Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980-2018

Description

Barry Hill’s tenth book of poetry selects from his Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, 2013, and described by John Kinsella as a ‘masterpiece’; Grass Hut Work (2016), his excursion into Hiroshima and Japanese poetry, which Sam Hamill said was ‘beautiful and quietly powerful’; Lines for Birds (2011) his collaboration with the painter John Wolseley, was acclaimed by Nathaniel Tarn as ‘a miraculous gift of a book’; The Inland Sea (2001), which David Malouf described as ‘a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism’; Ghosting William Buckley (1993), deemed by Barrett Reid a ‘major work’ of ‘stories, thought and music’ from the encounter of a ‘wild white man’ and the indigenous people of the Australian frontier. This Selected also includes recent poetry—lyrical, political and in memoriam.

Barry Hill has worked as a journalist and psychologist in Melbourne and London. He has been writing full-time since 1976 and is the author of many works in several genres, including a libretto performed in ‘The Studio’ at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. His short fiction has been widely anthologized and translated into Japanese and Chinese, and he has won national awards for poetry, non-fiction and the essay. He is a former Poetry Editor of The Australian and a Post-Doctoral Fellow from the University of Melbourne. The essays, Reason and Lovelessness, is his most recent book. He lives on the coast in southern Australia, looking out across the sea towards Tasmania and the Antarctic. His next book will be called The Tao on Cloudy Bay, a poetic interpretation of Chuang Tzu. He is married to the singer/songwriter Rose Bygrave.