Song in the Grass

The latest collection from the prize-winning singer, songwriter and poet.

Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan’s most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.

A precise language of environmental observation is braided into stories of family and kin networks. Careful descriptions of place anchor this collection in ecological watchfulness. Birds are sentinel to environmental change, and symbols of spiritual transformation. Song in the Grass includes over sixty different species of endemic or migratory Australian birds.

Archival practices of all kinds – what one poem describes as ‘a lyrical index’ – offer touchstones for this sonically rich collection, in which poetry becomes a way of sustaining love over distance, a collective music, and a compass for navigating in-common emergencies.

[Song in the Grass] brings lists, hymns, elegies and lyrics into an enlivening, idiosyncratic conversation…Fagan’s poetic voice, too, resists categorisation. Often the writing is bracing in its clarity, warmth and lyric compression, particularly her poems of family and home. Just as often, the poems demand careful reading and re-reading to absorb the oblique relationships between their motifs.
Andy Jackson, The Saturday Paper

Praise for Kate Fagan:

[Fagan] offers a world in which everything is on the verge of transfiguration – hyper-animate, meta-poetical, full of ineluctable energies. There’s an intelligence here that is brilliantly compelling, and a lovely tenderness and wisdom to its utterly original vision.
Gail Jones

Finely worked, highly conscious, attentive to complexity, and utterly unafraid of the rawness of feeling… As is the case with all significant work, this is a book that teaches you how to read it… [Fagan is] a poet of superb lyric sensitivity and experimental curiosity… It’s a poetry that celebrates possibility, in the face of everything that seeks to deny that it exists.
Alison Croggon, Meanjin

Full of intimate, wry song and a highly mobile use of language. Worlds and words dance together with mutually seductive, transformative results.
Judges’ comments, Age Book of the Year Awards 2012