Poetry

Headlands by Bruce Beaver

by Barry Hill •

May 1986, no. 80

University of Queensland Press, 73 pp, $14.95 hb, 0 7022 1788 3

Poetry

Headlands by Bruce Beaver

by Barry Hill •

May 1986, no. 80

The jacket painting on Bruce Beaver’s highly wrought little book of prose poems is Lloyd Rees’ ‘The Coast near Klama’. It’s an elevated view of virgin green and dun coloured headland, the ochres rising through. Sea swirls into an oysterish bay. There is one distant figure looking down on another distant figure in a rock pool below. The sky, as with so many Rees skies, is egg-shelly yellow near the horizon, a glowing compliment to the taste we form and hold of earth.

Barry Hill

Barry Hill has won Premier’s Awards for poetry, non-fiction, and the essay. He has been writing full-time since 1976, when Penguin published his first book, The Schools. Prior to that he worked as a educational psychologist and journalist in Melbourne and London. His short fiction was widely anthologised. In recent years he has been writing history and fiction. For fifteen years he was Radio Critic for The Age; for ten years the Poetry Editor for The Australian. He is possibly best known for his two major works, Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal possession, and Peacemongers, a study of Rabindranath Tagore and the history of bombing. Recent works include Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems and Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, 1980–2017.