Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR’s 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Criticisms first. Kim Carr’s insightful yet evasive memoir, A Long March, reads more like a short march. As a key left factional leader in the Australian Labor Party for the best part of forty years, the former Victorian senator squibs on details. He doesn’t explain the subterranean workings of the ALP; doesn’t fess up on the genesis of his feuds with the likes of Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Greg Combet, Anthony Albanese, and John Cain; doesn’t come clean on the part he played in the fall of the Gillard government in 2013; and doesn’t take his share of responsibility for the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments’ failure to implement his laudable industry policies. This book should be more revealing, much longer, and much more reflective.

In the Zeitgeist of rising Trumpism, fascism, international paranoia about war and famine, a cataclysmic end of the planet’s climate, and the fatalistic zeal for Armageddon, this collection of essays and other non-fiction texts is welcome. We can concentrate on the Indigenous personal and provocative visions that impact on Australian literature.

Emily Tsokos Purtill’s first novel, Matia, is both ambitiously expansive and, narrated as a series of moments in time, deftly miniaturised. Spanning four individual decades from 1940 to 2070, and moving between continents, it details the lives of four generations of Greek-Australian mothers and daughters. Unlike a conventional family saga, the novel has the associative structure of memory, moving through time and space in unpredictable ways, creating both threads of continuity and a sense of fragmentation. The narrative focus on women charts the struggle for agency through the eyes of the four women, each of them bequeathed a bracelet – the Greek word matia of the book’s title – intended to ward off the evil eye. As such, the modern concept of individualism collides with the realms of prophecy and superstition, producing a fascinating exploration of the crucial issues of female agency and choice.

In September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

Surely every university’s creative writing anthology has the tagline ‘these are fresh voices’ plastered somewhere in its pages. In Blood & Bone, the thirty-eighth UTS Writers’ Anthology, this freshness is not some marketing cliché but apropos, characterised by all the gory atavism of its title and the recurrent theme of the body throughout its pages. These eclectic pieces explore the tension and liminality between the dichotomies that construct our reality: there is growth and atrophy; human and non-human; mind and body. Frequently, the contributors return to the medical clinic, but also to the digital world of AI, ChatGPT, and social media.

Inga Simpson’s The Thinning owes a literary debt to the American nature writer Annie Dillard’s evergreen essay ‘Total Eclipse’ (1982). An account of the solar eclipse that Dillard observed on 26 February 1979, ‘Total Eclipse’ aims not merely to narrate experience but also to impart the shock of estrangement. It is an essay in awe, shot through with verbal echoes. In the moon’s long shadow, Dillard glimpsed an otherworld in which the hillside’s ‘hues were metallic; their finish was matte’, in which the living appeared as if preserved within ‘a tinted photograph from which the tints had faded’. When perfectly aligned, the moon and sun come to resemble a ‘thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring’: a partial eclipse’s relation to a total eclipse is the relation of ‘kissing a man’ to ‘marrying him’. What Dillard knew well, and what her sentences know best of all, is that there is a patness to causal narrative that impedes the expression of a genuine revelation. No amount of careful set-up can quite account for the new.

Every December, great white sharks leave the bountiful coasts of California to congregate at a small patch of the Pacific Ocean located approximately midway between Hawaii and Mexico. As the sharks have been diving there, they have been teaching scientists that the area now known as the White Shark Café is much livelier, and more nourishing, than previously thought. Meanwhile, a supposedly humdrum stretch of the deep North Atlantic seabed called the Porcupine Abyssal Plain has been revealed as adorned with rolling hills, some of them hundreds of metres in height, where seabed organisms thrive. Ten thousand kilometres south and east of the Plain, the Indian Ocean’s Saya de Malha Bank supports the largest seagrass meadow in the world, spectacular corals and coralline algae, and, in surrounding depths, pygmy whales, flying fish, and untold others. ‘Some of the most extraordinary, most biodiverse parts of our planet are on the high seas’, writes the science journalist Olive Heffernan. ‘Yet they are unknown to most.’

A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.