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The Jaguar
by Sarah Holland-Batt

A stunning new collection from one of Australia’s finest poets – her most impressive work yet.

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Overview

With electrifying boldness, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.

Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

Here, Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising: these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is an indelible collection by a poet at the height of her powers.

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Forrest Gander

‘Considering Sarah Holland-Batt’s technical nuance (her unpredictable harmonics, intense wordplay, neologisms, synesthetic sensual registries, double analogies), her book’s resonant emotional force, and its insistent internationality, what is there to say about The Jaguar that doesn’t begin with “Extraordinary!"’

John Kinsella

‘Sarah Holland-Batt is one of the best poets writing not only in Australia but anywhere in the world in English. What astonishes is the startling image held in place with a controlled and consistent voice, carrying the reader through confronting and surprising revelation. To achieve such control between the lyrical gesture and rhetorical mode is extremely difficult and complex, yet Holland-Batt manages to do this with deceptive ease. Her poetry is pushed to conceptual limits within a formally attuned methodology. This is an art of necessity, of belief, and of artisan-like commitment.’

Michelle de Kretser

‘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. Sarah Holland-Batt possesses a mighty and singular talent, showcased here in all its glory.’

Judith Beveridge

‘Marvelous for its poems of loss, lament, change, the effects of place, and the dynamics of memory, which are explored through dramatic and metaphorical ingenuity.’

Amanda Lohrey

‘If you feel like you might be ready to give up on poetry, try Sarah Holland-Batt's collection The Jaguar ... her artistry is exhilarating.’

Caroline Overington

‘Absolutely sublime.’

Stephen Romei

‘I'm in awe of Sarah Holland-Batt's The Jaguar’

Thuy On

‘Her words about decay and mortality are shot through with a lyric intensity as beautiful and ferocious as the titular beast.’

Judges' comments, Prime Minister's Literary Award 2023

‘A poet of meticulous craft, Holland-Batt amalgamates narrative and lyrical strategies to enterprising ends.’

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.