Sunday 9 September 
2.00 for 2.30 pm start 

Upstairs at The Friend in Hand Hotel
58 Cowper st, Glebe 

 

Puncher & Wattmann invites you to the launch of two new titles.

Towards Light by Sarah Day, to be launched by Brigitta Olubas

“To the vanishing point where light will expand/where light wants the eye to go (“Towards Light”) Light, as a physical and metaphorical entity recurs in many of the poems in this new collection by Sarah Day. Light makes its presence felt in these poems as a source of illumination and grace, it is also the means by which the flaws and discrepancies of the present and past are highlighted. “Sarah Day is a poet of wonderful attentiveness. She notices everything, persuading us, as readers, that she has seen and heard the living world truly. Wherever she stands, she gives lyrical utterance in Towards Light to our fresh, daily life, vibrant in its perpetuity.”
—Christopher Wallace-Crabbe

“Exquisitely nuanced, vivid and brilliant, Towards Light observes the natural world with grace and artistry and generously offers to her readers the gift of rapture.”
—Janine Burke

Sarah Day lives in Tasmania. She emigrated from England to Australia with her family as a child. Awards for her work include the Anne Elder, the Queensland Premier’s Award and the University of Melbourne Wesley Michel Wright Prize. The Ship was joint winner of the ACT Award. Her books have also been short-listed for the NSW Premier’s and the CJ Dennis awards. Her New & Selected Poems (Arc UK) received a UK Poetry Society special commendation. She has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and was Poetry Editor of Island for seven years. She lives with her family in Hobart where she teaches Creative Writing and English as a Second Language to year twelve students.

Neat Snakes by Martin Langford to be launched by Peter Kirkpatrick

The beautiful are not exempt from the need to be brave. But we treat them as if they are: it is how we destroy them. Interiority withdraws the body from the moment like a first step towards sorrow. The weigher of hearts keeps a list of the things we have laughed at. Like many poets, Martin Langford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The neat snakes collected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way of articulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they nevertheless retain the poem’s elegance, and its characteristic tension between emotion and idea. Neat Snakes is a very different addition to Australian writing.

Martin Langford has published seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are The Human Project: New and Selected Poems (P&W, 2009), and Ground (P&W, 2015). He is co-editor (with J. Beveridge, J. Johnson and D. Musgrave) of Contemporary Australian Poetry (P&W, 2016), and editor of Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788-2008 (P&W, 2009). An essayist and critic, he is the poetry reviewer for Meanjin. His work has been translated into French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish and Arabic.

“one of Australia’s foremost poets… a truly visionary poet”
—Andy Kissane

“… equal to anything now being written in Australia,”
—Brian Purcell, Five Bells

“Langford does not resort to obscurity to keep a poem afloat; the juxtapositions and word plays are stunning adornments to clear communication. Ground is a major contribution to the continued development of an Australian postcolonial poetics.”
—Philip Hall, Verity La