Eagerly We Burn: Selected Poems 1980 - 2018

by Barry Hill

Barry Hill's tenth book of poetry selects from his Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, 2013, and described by John Kinsella as a 'masterpiece'; Grass Hut Work (2016), his excursion into Hiroshima and Japanese poetry, which Sam Hamill said was 'beautiful and quietly powerful'; Lines for Birds (2011) his collaboration with the painter John Wolseley, was acclaimed by Nathaniel Tarn as 'a miraculous gift of a book'; The Inland Sea (2001), which David Malouf described as 'a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism'; Ghosting William Buckley (1993), deemed by Barrett Reid a 'major work' of 'stories, thought and music' from the encounter of a 'wild white man' and the indigenous people of the Australian frontier. This Selected also includes recent poetry--lyrical, political and in memoriam.

194 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2019

About the author

Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. His major works include Sitting In (1992), Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), and Peacemongers (2014). Each book has been groundbreaking in different ways: deeply, originally researched, crossing genres, multi-disciplinary, combining the personal with the generically philosophical. As a writer Hill's voice is informed by his Australian working-class and militant union background, which has been distilled by his higher education. After a decade working as a teacher, educational psychologist, and a journalist in Melbourne and London, he has been writing full-time since 1976-mainly based in Queenscliff, Victoria, but with stints at the Australia Council flat in Rome, where he finished poetic/dramatic works on Lucian Freud and Antonio Gramsci, and returns to Central Australia. In recent decades he has deepened his studies in Chinese and Japanese, which is in keeping with his long-term interest in Buddhism. Hill's voice is unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible. This collection of essays, reviews and reportage amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hill's contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.

Reviews

[Sean Harding · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surprisingly this book was not on here so I had to manually add it.
It wasn't that great, I never engaged with the poems.
Below average for me, but the geezer has been writing poetry fo a long time so someone must like his works.