Overview

Paul Hetherington's Collected Poems 1990-2022 travels into shape-shifting spaces where time and place unfold evocatively and mysteriously. His poetry explores themes connected to intimacy and desire, history and its tangents, memory, and the pleasures and strictures of travel. This passionate and various volume is enthralling-sometimes close-up in its focus and at other times architectural in its construction. In these poems the Australian sublime is uncanny, the domestic has vast implications, and there are extraordinary moments of defamiliarization and neo-surrealism where the artworks in galleries speak back to the viewer.

Full Product Details

9781965784433

Table of Contents

Reviews

Despite his awards and prominence in Australia, Paul Hetherington's poetry has been relatively unavailable in the U.S. This single volume now collects most of his published work since 1990, and documents his progress from earlier 'lineated lyric poems' to 'prose poems, ' where he proves both master and champion of the form. The effect is of a diary in collage, exploring what Wordsworth called the 'growth of the poet's mind.' It is remarkable for its epic ambition, energy, and varieties of 'telling slant'; and features cultural forays to Europe from a colonial frontier, transgressive relationship(s), and a search for literary and artistic communion that is at once 'classical, ' original, and impassioned. DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, and author of Do I Dream or Wake? Paul Hetherington's Collected Poems 1990-2022 is a generous offering from a generous poet. Reading the trajectory of his career (in reverse!) readers will encounter prose poems and lineated verse that tap into our emotions and aspirations, our psychology and conflicts with grace and good humor and profound tenderness. Hetherington is a poet of the heart-romantic and Romantic-where the familiar can be hyper-charged into something completely new. Collected Poems 1990-2022 hits high note after high note. Hetherington is exceedingly inventive as he remains true to his voice. Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story and Pink Lady Across Paul Hetherington's Collected Poems, through immaculate pacing and varying modes of address, we are immersed in shifting ways of seeing and a processing of memory that builds an immense picture, an almost epic canvas of a life of self-examination, of consideration of other lives, and also the contemplation of the relationship between material and abstract worlds. Hetherington's poems are archaeological, interconnected, cumulative, and painterly. And what makes this epic canvas so impressive is that it is full of minutiae and finely-tuned considerations. Such a visual body of work. Such an etymological body of work. Such an accumulation of the quotidian and the mythological, of the matter of fact fused with a penetrating analysis of object, moment and concept. John Kinsella, Author of Ghost of Myself and Spirals: Collected Poems (2014-2023)

Author Information

Paul Hetherington is a distinguished poet and Professor Emeritus at the University of Canberra, Australia. Among his 49 creative and critical books, edited books, chapbooks and artist books, and numerous scholarly chapters and articles, he has previously published 18 full-length collections of poetry, including Sleeplessness (Pierian Springs Press, 2023), Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, 2022) and Her One Hundred and Seven Words (MadHat Press, 2021). His poetry has appeared in more than 70 anthologies and has won or been nominated for over 50 national and international awards and competitions, including Pushcart Prize nominations. He won the inaugural The Marion Halligan Award (2024) for Sleeplessness and the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He is co-founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations, and he founded International Poetry Studies in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at his university in 2013. He founded the international Prose Poetry Project in 2014. He also worked in the cultural sector, most notably for the National Library of Australia influential quarterly humanities and literary journal Voices (1991-97). Paul chaired the Australian Capital Territory's Cultural Council (2005-13) and the ACT Public Art Panel (2006-11) and in these roles instigated numerous arts and cultural initiatives, including the development and delivery of the first comprehensive policy and action framework for public art in the ACT. He has edited eleven volumes, including co-editing with Distinguished Professor Cassandra Atherton the international Alcatraz (Gazebo Books, 2022); The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Poetry (MadHat Press, 2021); and the definitive Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press, 2020). With Cassandra Atherton he co-authored the authoritative Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available