'She cloaked herself in silt and quandary,
refused to leave the pond where she'd been fattened,
too bruised to seek the plainsong of the sea.'
from 'Song of the Silvering Eel'
LAUNCH BROOD CHAMBER
Annie Mairéad Hunter
SATURDAY 4 JULY 7PM
Dr Jennifer Harrison (poet & psychiatrist) will launch Brood Chamber.
About the Poetry
'Annie Mairéad Hunter's debut collection offers an astonishing range of poetry--from musing over the fate of childhood dolls to a surreal mountain ascent with a dead father on her back, from mourning the ravages of climate change to celebrating a chance poolside encounter with an imaginative youngster, from a clear-eyed recognition of the evils of colonial dispossession to a scrupulously fair account of the lives of settler ancestors —with expansive sympathy, broad erudition and an enviable command of language and form. This book is full of poems that freely offer part of themselves but hint at layers of meaning that remain tantalisingly out of reach.'
What others Say
A stunning first collection. Characterised by a uniquely imaginative cast of mind, these poems are rich with a musicality that feels entirely unforced phrases such as “glacial braille” keep on surfacing. The poems go deep into a wide range of crucial experience: motherhood and daughterhood are explored in wonderfully mythological and oceanic terms, and the natural environment is celebrated and defended and mourned in terms equally original, vivid and hard thinking. The writing displays impressive technical skill, from highly accomplished ghazals and sonnets to larger free verse poems, with a subtle feel for the pentameter line often in evidence. We are fortunate indeed that Hunter has refused “to turn away from the savage page.”--ROSS GILLETT
Solastalgia, elegy and lament suffuse this wide-ranging debut collection, whose language swims the tender, ambivalent matrix of maternal reckonings, the spectra of settler lineages, and the exigencies of climate catastrophe. The poems, both playful and precise, veer in mood and attitude across a range of forms; they tackle the residue and persistence of histories, and their grief struck mother lodes tend carefully to transience, erasure, silencing and loss. Hunter is not afraid to deploy literary conventions such as apostrophe to engage with other-than-human embodiments. Her poems are not for the faint-hearted: they brood, and, in their scoring of a music that brings an intimate litany alive, they do the work of brooding.--SHARI LYNELLE
About Dr Jennifer Harrison
Dr Harrison founded The Dax Poetry Collection at The Dax Centre, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of artworks created by individuals with lived experience of mental illness or psychological trauma. She's published eight poetry collections -- her most recent is titled Anywhy.
About the Author
Annie Mairéad Hunter lives and writes on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria. A winner of the ACU Poetry Prize, she shortlisted in the Robert Gray, the Liquid Amber and other prizes. Brood Chamber, many years in the making, is her first collection.
The Coolroom at Northern Arts Hotel
Djaara Country 359 | Barker St Castlemaine
This is a free event. All welcome.
Books are available for $.