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For many years, poet Frances Samuel worked at a museum, writing the text for exhibitions. In her new book she redefines the notion of a museum, making it infinite and wild. Like freewheeling thought experiments, Samuel's poems blur the lines between material and immaterial, natural and supernatural, to funny and surreal effect. Objects of significance include water bears and tornadoes, ancient penguins and robots, and a paper-cut skeleton that walks off the page. In this book, a museum is the a...

Sarah Broom's poetry profoundly engages the landscape of her native New Zealand. Experienced as both nurturing and menacing, tender and indifferent, it is the context within which other terrains are explored: heightened states of awareness, the physical extremes of illness, the drifts and tides of close relationships, the complexities of motherhood. Intensely conscious of death, her poetry is fiercely attached to life and love.

In this collection, Australian poet Les Murray challenges himself to write an elegy for his father, and to write about his altering country, its history, landscapes and peoples.

How can language contain the world that spillsFrom its torn rinds, how can my ode holdOn to language that ejects itself like birdsongFrom pine trees still shady with dawn . . . ‘To Mount Victoria’, The Commonplace OdesIan Wedde has been a major presence in New Zealand poetry since his work began appearing in journals in the late 1960s. His first book of poetry appeared in 1971; his sixth book won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1978; his sixteenth and most recent was a finalist in 2014....

Enough is a poetry collection about moving to the South Island of New Zealand, the gestation of a difficult second book, teaching writing, imagining other lives from their Internet traces, the aging of loved ones, and looking forward. Greatly influenced by happenings in poet Louise Wallace’s life, the book encompasses themes of location and family, and of the various journeys people take both geographically and emotionally. The poems span a range of formats and forms, from lines of verse to smal...

This collection of poems is divided into two parts, the first explores the domestic world of motherhood and daily existence and the poet's thoughts. The second part moves out of the house and into a world increasingly threatened by environmental destruction.

This is a superb introduction to poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. With insight and insider knowledge, poet Geoff Page emphasises the contribution made by the notable generation of Australian poets who emerged during and just after World War II. It includes several contemporary poems which are likely to become classics in the near future. Each poem is followed by a short, lively essay discussing its merits and suggesting why it might be considered a classic.

Consisting of Purgatorio: Up Close, Paradiso: Rupture, and Inferno: Leisure Centre, John Kinsella's "distractions" on Dante's Divine Comedy journey through time and space. Set in a wheat-belt Western Australia, these poems are a phantasmagoria of the real and imagined, depicting nature in its full regalia, resisting forces of environmental damage and human indifference.