Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. Three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the indigenous), biziura lobata (the colonial), musk duck (the common).

Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. Only a poet could make us hear the thundering whisper of insanity, the endless circling of the revolving door, the sheer practicality of whatever gets you through the night. Here are portraits of other people in wards filled...

An award-winning joint volume of poetry, Sandy Jeffs invites the readers into the world of schizophrenia in Poems from the Madhouse, while Deborah Staines presents vivid images that evoke the mythic past and the technological future in Now Millennium. Staines' sequence, Venus Port, explores the destruction of the social fabric set alongside poems of love and loss, images of video worlds as...

To love in a language prised from my wishbone.
To sing a landscape where village girls once burst the moon with giggles.
To dance through the fattest eye of a rice-grain.
To do all these in peace and war is the wish embodied in Merlinda Bobis’ poetry. From her epic poem Cantata of the Warrior Woman: Daragang Magayon to lyric reflections on longing, and finally to an erotic dance-drama, Bobis...