Barry Hill

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Biographical note:  Barry Hill’s long narrative poem, Ghosting William Buckley won the 1994 NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry, and his labour history, Sitting-In won the same award for Non-Fiction in 1992. Although he lives by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria, his recent work, including The Inland Sea, his third book of poetry, arises out of travelling and research in Central Australia. He teaches occasionally at the University of Melbourne and is poetry editor for the national newspaper, The Australian.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857271
ISBN-10:  1876857277
ISBN-13:  9781876857271
Author:  Barry Hill
Title:  The Inland Sea
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-01
Extent:  112pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 7.95
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of contents:
Part One
Song
Yapalpa
Nectar
Noon
Ribs
Nuptial Rocks
Little Buddha
Dove
Song
Banquet
Part Two
Song
Caravan
Ngkwarle
Song
Desert Cradling
At Babel Bore
Song
Salts
Song
Part Three
Back
Song
Found
Song
Byron’s Sky
Song
White Bird
Song
Underground Rivers Running
Song
Corkwood psalms and sonnets
Part Four
Song
Stone
Song
From Second Highest Dreaming Place in Town
Throat
Stills
The Same Air
Single Notes
Song

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Excerpt from book:  

Little Buddha

And the Buddha by the pool.
My small one, of soap stone.
A smooth semblance of
heaven within the mountain.
Gentle as a duck feather
floating under the full moon.

It saw. We heard. The gorge,
wide as protoplasmic Dreaming,
listened to all the old words
seethed open into ancestry.
Out of the corner of my eye
green rushes weaved their dance.

Would we leave it there?
I was happy enough to let it go,
turn my back on a graven image,
all for you. As you had sweetly stood
with the icon of the other shore.
Both surrendered by that pool.

Later the photos said it all.
Watery images. Cloud and warm water swirls
as translucent as the self.
As overlapping in time and space.
As inclusive, yes.
Your hair, your white, blue dress;
my shoulders and throat gone floral.

And the little Buddha spectre:
double-exposed with crocodile.
His calm smile in the tail.
A row of teeth in his lap.
How things happen hardly matters.
What swims in time is true
when you enter a pool with vows.

Review quote:  Hill’s moving love poem is also a work of spiritual convergence, the mystic marriage of two desert traditions, the Song of Solomon and an even older singing, that of the immemorial world of Central Australia – something only he could have brought off with such a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism.

David Malouf