The human desire for patterned language is as strong as the need for narrative.—Geoff Page In The Best Australian Poems 2015, you will find the who’s who of contemporary poets and the pick of new voices. Sometimes satirical, sometimes erotic, covering family, religion, war and mortality, Geoff Page’s selection celebrates the vital, the vigorous and the graceful voices that populate our poetry scene. Robert Adamson • Jordie Albiston • Judith Beveridge • Eileen Chong • Joe Dolce • Lin Van Hek • Nigel Roberts • Robyn Rowland • Jennifer Compton • Kevin Hart • Lisa Gorton • Clive James • Rozanna Lilley • Tony Page • Michael Sharkey • Chris Wallace-Crabbe • Fiona Wright • Jakob Ziguras • Les Murray • Fay Zwicky • Jamie Grant • Lucy Dougan • Ali Cobby Eckermann • Kevin Brophy • Billy Marshall Stoneking • Bruce Dawe • Anne Elvey • Geoff Goodfellow • Jennifer Maiden • AND MANY MORE . . .

‘Above all, poetry – for both its readers and its writers – is a form that demands attentiveness and active intelligence. It treats language as a volatile and charged commodity, and one whose subtleties and nuances are worth puzzling over.’ —Sarah Holland-Batt Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. Demonstrating the diversity, inventive brilliance and dynamism of our country’s finest poets, this collection features work from both rising stars and well-known figures, and presents a dazzling array of themes and styles. Whether addressing biotechnology or domestic violence, migrant experience or the natural world, the poems in this anthology are sure to inspire, provoke and move. Poets include Martin Harrison, Judith Beveridge, Clive James, Keven Brophy, Joanne Burns, Les Murray, Pam Brown, Eileen Chong, Luke Davies, Laurie Duggan, Geoff Page, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Toby Fitch, Robert Gray, Lisa Gorton, Natalie Harkin, John Kinsella, Felicity Plunkett, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Cate Kennedy, David Malouf, Julie Chevalier, Lionel G. Fogarty and many more…

Collects poems chosen by editor Sherman Alexie as the best of 2015, featuring poets such as Sarah Arvio, Chen Chen, Andrew Kozma, and Terence Winch.

From Simon & Schuster, in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry 1996 is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.

Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm again as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. Previous contributors include Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, Fiona Wright, Clive James, Lisa Gorton, Robert Adamson, Dorothy Porter, John Kinsella, David Malouf, Cate Kennedy and Les Murray. Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of The Hazards (UQP, 2015), which won the poetry prize at the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and Aria (UQP, 2008), which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Award, and the FAW Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology and the poetry editor of Island.

The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray's Waiting for the Past are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them - wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by sterilising chlorine. With the erasures the modern world brings, words, landscapes and lives descend to the Esperanto of the modern. The poet, with a salutary resistance, rejects the computer and the incursions of the levelling Modern in favour of old-fashioned typewriters, unlikely saints, lived-in places, an Easter rabbit edible and risen, farming in the spirit of ancestors. This is the past he waits for in scenes unmade by human carelessness, not only in his rural place but across the world. The poems speak of the near-unspeakable, of old age, vertigo, illness, and the durable resilience of married love.

Clive James is one of our finest critics and best-loved cultural voices. He is also a prize-winning poet. Since he was first enthralled by the mysterious power of poetry, he has been a dedicated student. In fact, for Clive, poetry has been nothing less than the occupation of a lifetime, and in this book he presents a distillation of all he's learned about the art form that matters to him most. With his customary wit, delightfully lucid prose style and wide-ranging knowledge, Clive explains the difference between the innocuous stuff that often passes for poetry today and a real poem: the latter being a work of unity that insists on being heard entire and threatens never to leave the memory. A committed formalist and an astute commentator, Clive offers close and careful readings of individual poems and poets (from Shakespeare to Larkin, Keats to Pound), and in some case second readings or re-readings late in life - just to be sure he wasn't wrong the first time! Whether discussing technical details of metaphorical creativity or simply praising his five favourite collections of all time, he is never less than captivating. Filled with insight and written with an honest, infectious enthusiasm, Poetry Notebook is the product of over fifty years of writing, reading, translating and thinking about poetry.