Whisper Songs
by Tony Birch

A timely and important collection of poems by the award-winning author of The White Girl and Blood.

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Overview

In this stunning collection Tony Birch invites the reader into a tender conversation with those he loves – and has loved – the most. He also challenges the past to speak up by interrogating the archive, including documents from his own family history, highlighting forcefully the ways in which the personal is also intensely political. Divided into three sections – Blood, Skin and Water – the poems in Whisper Songs address themes of loss (of people and place), the legacies of colonial history and violence, and the relationships between Country and memory. Whisper Songs reveals Birch at his lyrical and intimate best.

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Reviews

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Anne-Marie Te Whiu

‘His words are constellations of memories; his heart beats across hemispheres and time; as though his resistance is charged by the Earth’s magnetic field; blacker the better holds the light’

James Bradley

‘Negotiates the intersection of personal loss and historical truth with incredible intelligence and power.’

Tony Birch

Tony Birch is the author of four novels: Women & Children, which won the 2024 The Age Fiction Book of the Year; The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing, and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012. He has also published two poetry books and four short story collections, the most recent of which, Dark as Last Night, won both the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Tony Birch is an activist, historian and essayist, and is currently the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.