The Jaguar
Selected Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published:19th Sep '24
Should be back in stock very soon
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 many 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 touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry. Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity—as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet’s piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic. 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 The Jaguar (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.'
The UK debut of a stand-out Australian poet of her generation, The Jaguar: Selected Poems by Sarah Holland-Batt presents a generous selection from three collections [...] this poet's world is in ultra-high definition.
-- Jaya Savige * The Times Literary Supplement *Holland-Batt’s lines are not only packed with sensory impressions, but also alive with imagery and musicality. Many poems are built of multiple accumulations of metaphor, but some, especially in the works drawn from her third collection The Jaguar, use extended metaphors. What marks her out as a distinctive and major voice is the presence of Lorca’s duende – the dark power felt in many of the elegies for her father. The use of startling images here makes them unforgettable.
-- Pascale Petit * The Poetry Review, on The Jaguar: Selected Poems *Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar: Selected Poems is a very substantial volume bringing together work from her three collections published in Australia. Its sumptuous production chimes happily with the style of her writing: culturally sophisticated and highly intelligent as she clearly is, it’s above all the seemingly effortless sensuous evocativeness of her work that makes an impression from the beginning. […] an enjoyable and richly rewarding book.
-- Edmund Prestwich * The High Window *The Jaguar is a tour de force. It will leave you dazzled and devastated. The wisdom, kindness and musical rigour of these poems is everywhere apparent. Their emotional range is considerable: intimate, sorrowing, celebratory and philosophical by turn. Holland-Batt possesses a mighty and singular talent, showcased here in all its glory.
-- Michelle de KretserA remarkable sequence about the death of the author’s father from Parkinson’s Disease: tender, memorable poems that capture grief and loss and love through unforgettable imagery, often blended with humour… Lyrical and wise, this is a book from a poet at the height of her powers.
-- 2023 Stella Prize citationBy turns gorgeous and gut-wrenching, worldly yet intimate, Holland-Batt's The Hazards explores love and landscape from “O California” to Queensland, Boston Common to Sicily. These “postcards from another life” chart an inner travelogue, a new century in all its strange beauty. No one writes love poems like she does.
-- Kevin YISBN: 9781780377049
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 20mm
Weight: unknown
256 pages
Paperback original