Sarah Holland-Batt
Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Aria and The Hazards (UQP), and a forthcoming volume of essays on contemporary poetry, Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry (UQP, 2021). She is the recipient of a number of honours, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and a Sydney Myer Creative Fellowship. As of 2021, she is the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, and works as a Professor at QUT.
—for Vera Pavlova, in Mexico City
On the bus to Teotihuacan, we turna new god's name on our tongues
like a charm, jagging pastcinderblocked hills
chocked over the motorway,grey pixels stacked so high they merge
with the smoked white Mexican sky—then a guitar player in the aisle
begins a song whose only familiarword is corazon, we move on, billboards
graffitied Narco Estado scream by,and ... (read more)
How fine it is to mutinyagainst my tired mind—
say self, you are through,to smash into a mirrorball
of echoes all scaledin dizzying Nordic blue
feel the universe tiltand infinitely rebuild
to flickerlike a skerrick of spindle silver
needle-quick,and never be held—
this is the freedomof the unilluminated world
where corals pulsein the dark like deathstars, unmoved,
and leaflets of seagr ... (read more)
Unexpected on a day like this—sun shuttling through the 125th Street bridge,plastic strung in Harlem's elms like tattered wreaths:unseasonable, unreasonable spring.Under the red shadow of the Grant tenementslunchtime noshers clatter china at Bettolona,dogwalkers spread out on the grass in Sakura Park,men from the halfway homedrag their deckchairs into the street.Someone has left a string of Chri ... (read more)
Towards the end of Fiona McFarlane's enigmatic collection of short stories, The High Places, we meet the odd, enchanting story 'Good News for Modern Man', which functions as a key to many of the book's concerns. The story centres around Dr Bill Birch, a malacologist undertaking an obsessive study of a colossal female squid, Mabel, which he has trapped in New Zealand. Overseeing Birch's quirky unde ... (read more)
Lisa Jacobson’s third book, South in the World, opens with ‘Several Ways to Fall Out of The Sky’, a poem composed of imperatives instructing the reader in the strange art of descent. Jacobson’s poem deliberately invokes Auden’s famous piece of ekphrasis about Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which concerns itself with the relativity of sufferin ... (read more)
Favel Parrett’s second novel, When the Night Comes, opens with its teenage protagonist Isla lying awake in her bunk on a night ferry to Tasmania in the mid-1980s, ‘waiting for the rough seas’. Her younger brother sleeps beside her, and her distracted, emotionally distant mother – the kind of woman who is ‘always sitting places by herself in the night’ – is smoking on deck. Together, ... (read more)
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