Readings.com.au: The Age Book of the Year Shortlist 2009 Poetry

The Golden Bird: New And Selected Poems

Winner of the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry

The Golden Bird brings together the best of Adamson’s work from the last four decades, and many superb new poems. An accessible introduction to Australia’s foremost lyric poet and an insight into the recurring themes that have shaped his remarkable body of work.

Better Than God

Peter Porter is one of the pre-eminent Australian poets of his generation and a major figure in the landscape of British poetry. The publication of Better Than God will coincide with his 80th birthday. He has received the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry and innumerable other awards. A previous collection for Picador, Max Is Missing, won the Forward Prize for best collection.

Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography

John Kinsella's daring new volume of poetry, The Divine Comedy, is set in the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. It comprises three books: Purgatorio: up close, Paradiso: rupture, and Inferno: leisure centre.

The poet narrator takes the reader on a tour through the wonders of nature in its full regalia, resisting forces of damage and indifference that would see it destroyed. This is a book of hope and redemption that nonetheless faces up to the terrors and traumas in all of us, terrors and traumas we play out on the world, often unwittingly.

Fire Season

The poems in Fire Season are illuminated by the intensity of everyday experience, dwelling in situations of want or absence, or radiant in the aura of those legendary beings, the heroines and monsters of film and story and myth, around whom the drama of life is concentrated. Alert to the forces which inhabit relationships, or exhaust them, and to the ways in which the moment is transformed by impending or departed consequence, the collection seeks to convey, as its title suggests, something of the vitality and the threat of fire, ‘Something about heroism / and the weight of stone. Something about ash.’

Kate Middleton is a Melbourne poet. Her poems have been published in journals and newspapers in Australia, the USA and UK. She studied music at the University of Melbourne and has worked as a librettist on three operas, two of which have been performed. In 2006 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize for ‘Rainbow’s End’, published in this collection. Fire Season is her first book of poetry.

True Thoughts

True Thoughts follows the success of Pam Brown’s last major collection Dear Deliria published in late 2002 and awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2004.

This new work collects twenty-three poems written between 2002 and 2007 in a period of global instability and military irruption. Even so, this collection of deceptively minimalist poems is anchored in the everyday and moderated by a self-conscious slant to it. The poems move with a clear agency through many realms, both actual and metaphysical. The actual includes sharply delineated streetscapes, imagined havens, distant places, encounters with friends, ideas, history, and a kind of fragmented urbanity. The metaphysical engages multilayered states of being and, sometimes, simple moods.

Brown’s writing is deftly ironic, and affects a sense of the ludicrous in the face of mortality, as the poems attempt to fathom the question ‘how to live?’ alongside the larger one ‘how to live now?’