Jaguar

With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batts books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collectionThe Jaguar(2022),this volume will introduce one of Australias best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batts 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 fathers long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the bodys animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things.The Jaguar: Selected Poemsbrings together the finest work from her debut volumeAria(2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes ofThe Hazards(2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies ofThe Jaguar(2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love.As John Kinsella has said, 'Holland-Batt is one of the best poets writing not only in Australia but anywhere in the world in English. This is an art of necessity, of belief, and of artisan-like commitment.'