Sarah Holland-Batt: The Jaguar

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor, and critic, the author of three award-winning collections. She is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Her UK retrospective, The Jaguar: Selected Poems, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. With its rich selection from each of her books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia’s best-known and mostly 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 everywhere 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. Her portrayal of a much loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022).

Join us on Tue Nov 05 2024 at 07:00:00 GMT at the Scottish Poetry Library. Get ready to immerse yourself in the captivating world of poetry with Sarah Holland-Batt as she presents her latest work, The Jaguar. Don't miss this opportunity to experience the power of words and connect with fellow poetry enthusiasts. See you there!

Host or Publisher Scottish Poetry Library