Holland-Batt, Sarah: The Jaguar

Bloodaxe Books, paperbackPublication Date: November 5, 2024Publisher Marketing: With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt's books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia's 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-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. The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies