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Pete Spence (1946-) has achieved an enviable international acclaim for much of his work in painting, experimental film, visual poetry and of course the exuberant, engaging lyric verse. Pete has been one of the undiscovered heroes of Australian literature, for over four decades he has been quietly pursuing his own direction in this multiplicity of art forms but in particular in his witty, idiosyncratic, entertaining poetry. PERRIER FEVER is his first largescale collection and we believe it to be an important milestone in Australian poetry.

Steel worker, jackhammer labourer, crane dogman, student, employment bureaucrat, high school teacher, community activist, local government councillor and ultimately Mayor of Ashfield, Rae Desmond Jones (1941-) has had a life parallel to poetry like very few in Australia. He may write in a realist tradition but one very much on his terms. This volume features new and selected poems from Rae’s four decades of verse.

Scourge of Brisbane’s poetasters (indeed of all that breed) Liam Ferney (1979-) is an irascible risk-taking entertainer who earns his living as a PR flak, who from the age of 14 was involved in poetry readings and festivals. BOOM captures the fabulous combative nature of Ferney’s experience & poetry; this is language to be confronted head-on and devoured whole.

With one previous credit to her name for a volume in the late 1980s, Rachael Munro (1953-) has been diligently ‘ploughing her own field’ in Australian poetry for decades. Her verse is keenly observed and shot through with wry quips and wryer subtlety. Munro’s is a brave voice but not overbearing, rather it takes courage in its stride, something perhaps owing to the poet’s recent battle with leukemia. She is donating her royalties from sales of the volume to the Leukemia Foundation.

Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne lives in Perth, Western Australia, with her female partner of eighteen years and their four-year-old daughter. Centred on the universal themes of family life and on issues of fertility/infertility, her poems are public works of plain speaking vigour. ‘For if we are a modern family,’ she says, ‘my poetry also shows we are breathtakingly similar to most families on earth.’

Unaligned with any of Australian poetry’s factions, yet well aware of his audience, Rob Wilson enjoys writing his risk-taking, for-the-hell-of-it poetry.

In an era of often overly-informative maximalism, Rob Wilson is succinct and measured − half-turned towards the world while auguring some newly burgeoning creation. Within the cathedral of Modernism, these poems are constructed like little chapels, cool and tenebrously illuminated. − John Hawke

Rob Wilson’s (great) titles, like little bold brains, direct poems of surprising image and syntactical direction, as if to say hey, think like this: it’s (tough) fun. A cloud in tight black jeans. − Michael Farrell

The nature of Sydney and the nature in Sydney, these are the foundations for much of Michael Aiken’s plain-speaking poetry, a verse that can be spare or lush as the city itself or as the city requires.

Michael Aiken’s poems are minimalist in style and expansive in scope. He has the ability to infuse a poem with menace and tenderness, often within the same line, and he does so with a quiet yet potent confidence.

Sacred kingfisher in a dead gum
beats a butterfly to pieces

These poems reveal a fierce ability to take risks with shape and form, image and breath. Here is a poet prepared to look under the skin of common ground and to offer us amazement. — Anthony Lawrence

Aiken has carved out his own patch of ground to observe and reflect upon … the work … gets increasingly stronger as the pages get turned. The ‘Sydney’ sequence … is a great achievement. This book is held together by the recurrent trope of ‘the security man’, constantly vigilant, alert to all that passes, finding potential threat in the fragments (detritus) of city existence, and yet open to glimpses of beauty and wonder which occur: so many unexpected epiphanies. The natural world and its law-of-the-jungle amorality is a constant point of reference; a reminder of how thin a veneer civilisation really is. — John A Scott

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s EXHUMED is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references. Atherton’ s appeals to humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.

Evan Jones is a notable senior Australian poet whose underrated status deserves to be rectified. This volume contains a generous selection of his published work, spanning more than half a century. Marked by clarity, formal versatility and technical command, Jones’ poetry celebrates family, love, friendship, the ordinary and extraordinary in daily living – and does so with honesty, wit and panache. An astute observer, he can also be a challenging political poet, as witnessed by his strange, visionary narrative ‘A Dream of Barricades’ published here in full.

After two decades-plus of quiet yet pointed observations in both Australia and the United States, THE BLUE DECODES is poetry by a woman speaking for herself and just as importantly about her generation, a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented. Yet, as Cassie Lewis advises throughout her work, all that optimistic blue we once saw beckoning can be regained, decoded if you will, that we may become our original, authentic selves.

Alan Wearne, publisher of Grand Parade Poets and editor of WITH THE YOUNGSTERS writes: The 23 sestinas and 22 villanelles contained in this volume are the result of group work involving my poetry classes 1998-2016. And if they started as teaching exercises showing students how to construct the highly formulaic sestina and villanelle, this initial reason was soon shed and the imagination gained control. For at their best these verse forms aren’t so much rule-bound as possessed of rules made for bending and breaking.

As snapshots of what collections of people were thinking and imagining at a particular time, a lot of virtually useless artifacts may have been created, except for this: they were written to entertain and when entertainment is imaginative and challenging it’s nothing like useless.

Indeed, how do we know that group participation wasn’t the basis for the ballads and epics of earlier times? Are these poems ‘the future’ of poetry? Probably not, though they may be more of ‘a future’ than plenty of verse being practiced today in Australia let alone throughout the English writing world.

Grand Parade Poets are pleased to be publishing THE GANG OF ONE – THE SELECTED POEMS of Robert Harris, edited by Judith Beveridge with an introduction by Philip Mead. Though well represented in anthologies, Harris (1951-1993) is a major writer who has until now missed out on the Selected Poems milestone. Unaligned with any ‘faction’, though a close friend to many in the poetry/literary community, Harris is a very fine poet with this for an important hallmark: the variety of his subject matter and inspiration. Consider this for starters: you turn the page from a suite of poems fired by the World War 2 sinking of HMAS Sydney and then you are in Tudor England, with all the plots and counter-plots surrounding Lady Jane Grey, the ‘nine day queen’ and martyr. And beyond even the variety there are two things which truly anchor the Harris opus: his commitment to writing of and about Australia (though never to the exclusion of others, nor in any phoney nationalist manner) and his Christian faith, which probably was his poetry’s bedrock. Here is a volume of verse both gritty and humane, by a decided ‘one off’. Both his memory and Australian literature deserve it.

All poetry, not just Australian poetry, is always in need of products that supply art, intellect and satiric bite. This is why Grand Parade Poets is very pleased to announce the publication of Whirlwind Duststorm, a new volume of poetry by John Hawke, which certainly possesses all three.

Consciousness is like the experience of the poem – of being in perpetual motion, constantly distracted by the images before us. Embroiled in this storm, we are travelling, pummelled, unable to find firm footing, and yet shaped and honed by different influences, some of which are merely peripheral, and many of which emerge from class. Identity, personal history and narrative are called into question, leaving us with the poem as the only permanence.

“Whirlwind Duststorm points at an answer to Hölderlin’s question about the purpose of poets in destitute times.” – Liam Ferney

“Wondrously evokes each precarious profit and loss that crams this multilayered world.” – Gig Ryan

John Hawke’s previous volume, Aurelia (Cordite 2015), received the Anne Elder award.