The Bone House | Giramondo Publishing

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The Bone House

324 pages
Paperback, 19.7 x 13 cm
Published October 2005
ISBN 9781920882068
Epdf ISBN 9781925336863
Epub ISBN 9781925336870

The Bone House

Beverley Farmer

The three long essays that make up The Bone House are an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, each based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness.

What does art know that we do not? How does the image have such a hold on us all? Alongside the urge to grasp the world, to abstract and delve, is the urge to make our visions known, somehow to fix the moment in time in its fullness of meaning. In the essays, this hoard of moments takes the form of a mosaic, composed of myth, poetry and fable, of relics of the past, of explorations and illuminations and surface impressions. Set out like a commonplace book, they can be read in any sequence, or savoured for their detail.

 

About the Author

Beverley Farmer

Writing across many different genres, poetry as well as prose, Beverley Farmer (1941–2018) is considered one of Australia’s most important authors. She has published with Giramondo the writer’s notebook A Body of Water ; The Bone House, a collection of essays on the life of the body and of the mind; and This Water: Five Tales , her last work of fiction. New editions of her novels Alone (1980) and The Seal Woman (1992) were published by Giramondo in 2024 and 2025 respectively. A collection of newly discovered haikus by Farmer is forthcoming in 2026.

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In Memoriam Beverley Farmer

A eulogy delivered by Ivor Indyk at Beverley Farmer’s memorial service at Queenscliff on Sunday 29 April 2018. It is difficult to write a formal eulogy for Beverley Farmer, because she was herself so much a writer of process. Her characters are often portrayed in ‘in-between’ states, in transition – culturally, socially, physically – and she […]

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