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 American 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 has touched the hearts of many people who would never usually read a book of poetry.
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
(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.'