Song in the Grass
Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan’s most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.
A precise language of environmental observation is braided into stories of family and kin networks. Careful descriptions of place anchor this collection in ecological watchfulness. Birds are sentinel to environmental change, and symbols of spiritual transformation. Song in the Grass includes over sixty different species of endemic or migratory Australian birds.
Archival practices of all kinds — what one poem describes as 'a lyrical index' — offer touchstones for this sonically rich collection, in which poetry becomes a way of sustaining love over distance, a collective music, and a compass for navigating in-common emergencies.
Kate Fagan is a writer, musician and scholar whose third volume, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year Award. She directs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers from Western Sydney, and is a former Editor of How2 magazine (US). Kate is also an internationally esteemed songwriter whose album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive’s Folk Recording Award. She is currently Director of the WSU Writing and Society Research Centre and Chair of the Sydney Review of Books Advisory Board.
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