Beneath the Tree Line

Jane Gibian’s poetry is remarkable for its clarity of perception and its sensitivity to the details and rhythms of life – whether in nature or in social routines. The poetry’s engagement is first and foremost with the natural environment, and with the contrast between the human engagement – with its extremes of fascination and despair – and the natural world itself, disinterested and unforgiving. The landscapes range from the coast to the forest, from rivers in urban settings to country towns and their surroundings. Their beauty is felt alongside their vulnerability to degradation. Throughout there is the awareness of connectedness, between people, places, seasons, animate and inanimate things – and the power of language to celebrate these connections, to register joy and constraint, and to draw on different kinds of reality. Later in the collection, Gibian’s poetry focuses on the passage of time and its vagaries, the ancient cycles of nature, the threat of change, personal histories, the fleeting moments of awareness captured in poems.

I very much like the inflections of voice and tone in her work, how she keeps the reader almost spellbound to secrecy and intimacy by displacing her work from narrative.
Judith Beveridge

Sensuous, beautifully tactile and alive, these poems glitter with the world around us in all its fragility, damage and wonder.
Peter Boyle

Gibian’s poems are remarkable accretions of sedimentary detail in which the reader is almost asked to eavesdrop on the way linguistic processes construct an environment of words.
Jennifer Harrison

Special Offer

We are currently offering a special bundle on collections by Shevaun Cooley, Jane Gibian, Kristen Lang and Kate Middleton. Attuned to their immediate surroundings as well as global ecological concerns, these poets consider natural and man-made environments and our relationships with them.

Normally valued at $96, this bundle is offered at $75 (postage is free within Australia).

Buy the bundle for $75›