August, driving from North Bend,from Empire, we saw how the waves gutthe bluffs until they are pocked, wholescoops of rock being pawed out by water.But this year nothing moves at Shore Acres,the water is static as land, and stripesof foam bone its slate like a corset.We are here for the end of movement.You stay to watch the ocean. I go backto the Japanese garden. I only want to seestillness where I expect it, the sombre willow,the colossal Monterey pine; I sit,making myself limestone and basalt,on the grounds of what was once the summerhouse of a pioneer shipbuilder. Now it is nobody’sprivate estate, but the home of a gardenerwho pulls yellow roses through the mistin hedged circles. I think I am stoneas the arrowheads of pines vanishinto the understory of cloud. I have stoppedlonging for whatever it was I desiredand have given in to the body’s basic needfor rest. Bare feet, bare face, I waitat what I imagine to be a shrine’s gategathering the kind of force requiredto stop loving, as only stone can.
Shore Acres
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Sarah Holland-Batt, The Jaguar: Selected Poems.
(Bloodaxe Books, September 19, 2024),
www.bloodaxebooks.com.
Sarah Holland-Batt has worked as an editorial consultant and assistant for publishing houses New Directions and Atria Books in New York, and as the poetry editor of Island magazine from 2014-2019. She was also the editor of Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. In 2020, supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Copyright Agency, she was appointed the Poet’s Voice columnist at The Australian newspaper; her collected columns for this paper were subsequently published in Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry (UQP, 2021). From 2022-23, she was the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. As of 2024, she is a co-host of the Book Club on the Hon Julia Gillard AC’s A Podcast of One’s Own. She also serves in a range of leadership positions across the arts, including on the Council of the National Library of Australia and the inaugural Council of Writing Australia. She presently lives in Sydney, where she is Professor and Head of Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.
Hexham, Northumberland
England
Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father’s long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.
"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. Holland-Batt possesses a mighty and singular talent, showcased here in all its glory."
—Michelle de Kretser
"Considering 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'."
—Forrest Gander
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