Song in the Grass - Kate Fagan

The latest collection from the prize-winning singer, songwriter and poet.

Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan’s most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.

A precise language of environmental observation is braided into stories of family and kin networks. Careful descriptions of place anchor this collection in ecological watchfulness. Birds are sentinel to environmental change, and symbols of spiritual transformation. Song in the Grass includes over sixty different species of endemic or migratory Australian birds.

Archival practices of all kinds – what one poem describes as ‘a lyrical index’ – offer touchstones for this sonically rich collection, in which poetry becomes a way of sustaining love over distance, a collective music, and a compass for navigating in-common emergencies.

This is experiment and lucidity in equal turns – ecopoetry with the hauntological reverberations of language. It’s echopoetry. And why not? What is the point of a song if, soon enough, there will be no grass left on which to sing it?
J. Taylor Bell, Australian Book Review

[The] lyric possibility engendered by Fagan’s poetry is perhaps the clearest note sounding through her sonically rich collection: within a present that clamours with grief – ecological, social and political – the profound possibilities for reconnection, reinterpretation and recalibration remain present, if only we will slow down and listen for them. Fagan advocates for this with a poetic voice that seems to have grown remarkably (and almost impossibly!) more assured since her last collection. It is confident in its precise observations, unerringly poised in its linguistic alertness, and unabashed in its choice of what to pay attention to.
Carissa Chye, Grattan Street Press

[Song in the Grass] calls to its readers to attend to our interconnected lives, to intergenerational care, and to being alive to the deep ecologies we find our home in… [and] will continue to sound and resound — with their music of a reflective life — long after reading.
Ann Vickery, Cordite

Praise for Kate Fagan:

[Fagan] offers a world in which everything is on the verge of transfiguration – hyper-animate, meta-poetical, full of ineluctable energies. There’s an intelligence here that is brilliantly compelling, and a lovely tenderness and wisdom to its utterly original vision.
Gail Jones

Finely worked, highly conscious, attentive to complexity, and utterly unafraid of the rawness of feeling… As is the case with all significant work, this is a book that teaches you how to read it… [Fagan is] a poet of superb lyric sensitivity and experimental curiosity… It’s a poetry that celebrates possibility, in the face of everything that seeks to deny that it exists.
Alison Croggon, Meanjin

Full of intimate, wry song and a highly mobile use of language. Worlds and words dance together with mutually seductive, transformative results.
Judges’ comments, Age Book of the Year Awards 2012

Giramondo Publishing
English
Softcover, 96 Pages
148 mm x 210 mm