QUT Creative Writing academic, award-winning poet, editor and critic Sarah Holland-Batt tonight launches The Hazards, her much-anticipated second collection of poetry.
The Senior Lecturer from QUT's Creative Industries Faculty has attracted international acclaim since her first collection - Aria - was published in 2008. Earlier this year she was published in the highly prestigious New Yorker magazine and spent five weeks at Yaddo, the oldest and most esteemed writers' colony in the United States, whose previous fellows have included luminaries such as Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, John Cheever and Leonard Bernstein.
Ms Holland-Batt tonight celebrates the release of The Hazards with a launch at The Menagerie on QUT's Kelvin Grove campus.
The Hazards, published by UQP, was mostly written while she was living in New York and Rome, and was supported by fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and a Fulbright Scholarship in New York.
The collection is an expansive and cosmopolitan meditation on the brutalities of history and the cyclical violence of the natural world.
"The poems in The Hazards cover diverse geographical territory - from a haunted postcolonial Australian landscape to the vicious animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua," Ms Holland-Batt said.
"My writing often springs from long stints I spend travelling and living overseas, and exile, change and loss are consequently the engine that drives many of the poems.
"The book considers these themes from many angles: change and extinction in nature, the world of visual art, personal and private losses and romantic love. This can be unsettling terrain, but the best poetry often arises from uncertain and difficult places."
As well as The New Yorker, which published the poem 'O California' in its 90th anniversary edition in February, many other major international magazines and anthologies have published poems from The Hazards, while the Spanish translation rights to the book were sold to Vaso Roto Ediciones well in advance of its publication.
Ms Holland-Batt was awarded $40,000 by the Australia Council in New Work Grant funding in 2015 to commence work on her third collection of poems. She is also the recipient of a highly prestigious Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, an Asialink Literature Residency in Japan, and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, among other honours.
Ms Holland-Batt's first book, Aria, attracted rave reviews and collected a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the FAW Anne Elder Award, as well as being shortlisted in both the Queensland and New South Wales Premiers' Literary Awards for Poetry.
The photo can be downloaded from flickr.
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