Poetry

Fossil and Lamb

Poetry of the provisional

by Paul Hetherington •

May 2025, no. 475

Lamb by Barry Hill

re.press, $30 pb, 199 pp

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Poetry

Fossil and Lamb

Poetry of the provisional

by Paul Hetherington •

May 2025, no. 475

Barry Hill has written thirteen collections of poetry, including Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980-2018 (Shearsman, 2019). These volumes demonstrate his interest in the natural world, Australian history, White Australia’s relationships to Indigenous and Asian cultures, and cross-cultural experiences more generally. His poetry explores politics, art and ekphrasis, literature, autobiography, and spiritual issues, including, persistently, Mahayana Buddhism and its teachings about ‘emptiness’.

Paul Hetherington

By this contributor

Paul Hetherington has published seventeen volumes of poetry and prose poetry and won or been nominated for more than forty national and international awards and competitions, recently winning the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He co-wrote Prose Poetry: An introduction (Princeton, 2020), and co-edited Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020). He is Emeritus Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra.