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Kate Middleton’s new collection is illuminated by the intensity of everyday experience, dwelling in situations of want or absence, or radiant in the aura of those legendary beings, the heroines and monsters of film and story and myth, around whom the drama of life is concentrated. Alert to the forces which inhabit relationships, or exhaust them, and to the ways in which the moment is transformed by impending or departed consequence, Fire Season seeks to convey, as its title suggests, something of the vitality and the threat of fire; ‘Something about heroism / and the weight of stone. Something about ash.’

This exquisite collection of poetry, while loosely following Charles Darwins life, is more a portrait in verse of his inner and family life. In 1836, a twenty-six year old Charles Darwin stopped at Wentworth Falls en route to Bathurst, during the Beagles short stay in Australia. The walk Darwin took through the bush, along the creek to the falls, is the same one the poet now takes, with its plaque fastened to a rock: Charles Darwin passed this way. This was a young Darwin, his observations on the Beagle allowing his ideas on the origins of the species to first gestate; a highly sensitive man who loved Paradise Lost and Wordsworths Preludes; keenly aware that geological forces of time were truly poetical, carrying a flower painters colour samples around with him so that he might better describe his own collections; a man in love with the mysteries of the world, who believed that science and poetry were, after all, but a series of philosophical riddles to solve.

Eight Habitation refers to the Buddhist notion of purgatory, a mystic realm where the meaning of a human life is judged. Adam Aitken’s new poems inhabit a range of landscapes & perspectives, in Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, China & Australia, with an empathy & understanding that suggest a consciousness imbued with an Asian sensibility. Blending the traditional, the cosmopolitan & the unexpected in their observation of detail, the poems register the dignity & resilience of a world recovering from personal tragedy & the trauma of history.