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

Aria
by

Sarah Holland-Batt’s Aria, winner of the 2007 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, is a striking debut.

A$24.95
(Paperback)
Unavailable
Overview

From this living tinder
I have made
a thin blue flame.
It will not stay
unless I cup
my palm around it.

Like piano music heard through a high window, the language is haunting but entirely of this world. The poems are awake to the dark constellations of art and history, to what momentarily is, and to what flows endlessly on.

Details
Sarah Holland-Batt

Sarah Holland-Batt

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor and critic, and a Professor of Creative Writing at QUT. Her first book, Aria (UQP, 2008), was the recipient of a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards for Poetry. Her latest book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize and The Australian Book of the Year 2022, was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her second book, The Hazards (UQP, 2015), won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature John Bray Memorial Prize, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and the Queensland Literary Awards. She is the recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature residency in Japan, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours.