With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt's books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia's best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time. Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt's cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father's long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body's animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much loved father trying to cope with Parkinson's Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry. Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity-as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet's piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic. The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. As John Kinsella has said, 'Holland-Batt is one of the best poets writing not only in Australia but anywhere in the world in English. This is an art of necessity, of belief, and of artisan-like commitment.'

About the Author

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic. Born in Southport, Queensland in 1982, she grew up in Australia and the United States, and has also lived in Italy and Japan. She holds a first-class Honours degree in Literature, an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Queensland, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar from 2010-2011. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, an Asialink Literature Residency, a Chateau de Lavigny Fellowship, a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours.

Her first book, Aria, was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize, was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards, and was commended for The Age's Poetry Book of the Year. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Prize, and the John Bray Memorial Poetry Award. Her third book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize and the Queensland Premier's Award for State Significance, and was named The Australian newspaper's 2022 Book of the Year. The Jaguar was also longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

Her UK retrospective, The Jaguar: Selected Poems, is due from Bloodaxe in September 2024. She will be in the UK to give readings from the book in autumn 2024, supported by a travel grant from Australia Council for the Arts.

Reviews

The Jaguar is a tour de force. It will leave you dazzled and devastated. The wisdom, kindness and musical rigour of these poems is everywhere apparent. Their emotional range is considerable: intimate, sorrowing, celebratory and philosophical by turn. Holland-Batt possesses a mighty and singular talent, showcased here in all its glory.

-- Michelle de Kretser

A remarkable sequence about the death of the author's father from Parkinson's Disease: tender, memorable poems that capture grief and loss and love through unforgettable imagery, often blended with humour... Lyrical and wise, this is a book from a poet at the height of her powers.

-- 2023 Stella Prize citation

By turns gorgeous and gut-wrenching, worldly yet intimate, Holland-Batt's The Hazards explores love and landscape from "O California" to Queensland, Boston Common to Sicily. These "postcards from another life" chart an inner travelogue, a new century in all its strange beauty. No one writes love poems like she does.

-- Kevin Young



Book Information
ISBN 9781780377049
Author Sarah Holland-Batt
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 20mm