Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are respectfully cautioned that this website contains images of people who have passed away.

UQP acquires new poetry collection, The Jaguar, from award-winning poet, critic and QUT Professor Sarah Holland-Batt
Posted 14.09.2021

UQP acquires new poetry collection, The Jaguar, from award-winning poet, critic and QUT Professor Sarah Holland-Batt

UQP is delighted to announce that we have acquired a new poetry collection from award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt.

Following on from her Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winning volume The Hazards, The Jaguar is a mesmerising and devastating collection confronting a father’s transfigurations through long illness and death, and a daughter forged by grief.

The Jaguar is marked not only by Holland-Batt’s distinctive lyric intensity, musicality, and technical mastery, but also an electrifying boldness and fearlessness of vision. Here, the poet courageously confronts the most difficult and intimate territory: the shocking metamorphoses of Parkinson’s Disease, mortality and the charged moments before and after a death, and the end of love.

Opening and closing with startling elegies which see in death both loss and liberation—several of which have been published in The New Yorker—and spanning love and travel poems in the autobiographical mode that perform a ruthless (if ironic) dissection of the self, Holland-Batt’s new collection is distinguished by a stark clarity of voice and striking forthrightness.

If Holland-Batt is at her most compelling in The Jaguar, it is in part because she is at her most uncompromising. That refusal to compromise sits in delicious tension with the technical beauty of the work.

The Jaguar is a singular collection by one of Australia’s finest poets that challenges us to view death’s desolations as a gift.

Sarah Holland-Batt states: ‘I’m delighted The Jaguar has found a home with UQP, one of Australia’s oldest and most storied literary presses. Sometimes life hands you material that feels dangerous—and at times nearly impossible—to write about. This was one of those books. I’m delighted to know these poems will finally be out in the world, and with a press whose legacy I admire so deeply.’

Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:

‘It is such an honour for UQP to publish Sarah Holland-Batt’s third book of poetry. The poems in The Jaguar are magnificent, risky, and brave: there is a stylishness and sophistication to her work that is unsurpassed by her peers. Whether writing moving, indelible elegies for her father, blistering confessional love poems, or sharply observed meditations on place and travel, Sarah remains one of Australia’s most fearless and powerful writers.’