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The Possibility of Flight
Lia Hills Winner of the 2008 IP Picks Best Poetry Award The poems in Lia Hills’ first collection journey from ‘artesian memories’ of the Australian desert to the ‘shifting territory of the gods’ in rural Pakistan, as they glide with a wing shift between love, language and faith.
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ISBN 9781921479076 |
RRP: AUS$25 |
Poetry |
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Reviews |
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Lia Hills
Lia is a poet, novelist and translator living in Melbourne. Her work has been published, performed and translated both in Australia and overseas, and has won numerous awards.
She is editor and co-initiator of the poetry section of Moving Galleries, a poetry/art project on trains in Melbourne.
Her forthcoming publications include a crossover novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living (Text Publishing), and a translation of Marie Darrieussecq’s acclaimed novel, Tom Est Mort, from French into English.
Samples
an anatomy of birds
You found it in the humus
of emergent things, its
feather skull one hundredth
of its skyborne weight, grey
treasure gone, keel clung to
its breast no longer obliged
to guide and pitch, your fingers,
still with their flesh, decadent
against this picked white, your
density fondling its hollowness,
the cavities that once dissected
light, one feather fixed to its
ladder spine, Jurassic toes coiled
to their fate, your hand defies the
giant’s requisite to crush, this fragile
survey of the possibility of flight.paradigm
at night I rise to gather lost words
they collect in edges
these invisible demons
make for consequential myth
I could ride the rise of the bête-noire
crusade against language
it’s lyric I seek
but not in an a cappella of newsprint
crystal ball rhetorician’s tool
the proof in the unhappening the raw mix
entends-tu le glas qui sonne?
as dawn crawls
it’s dust I find
lament my dissociation of sensibility
on a molecular scale
am I to become atomised
speak the language of the blind?Links
to book Lia for school appearances, residencies or festivals
eNews 37: Winner of IP Picks 08: Best Poetry.
eNews 38: Interview with Lia Hills about The Possibility of Flight
Lia Hills takes lyric poetry and fills it with philosophical nous. Her vision begins with intimacy, then looks outward - taking in phenomena - a 'song rises in search of a tongue' and 'absence travels the duskpaths' until the poet realises 'it is the emptiness that sings'. The language is sparse and musical. The subjects range from war to 'memory games', love and family. Hills takes a flight from the moral self, out over the possibilities of prayer and the imagination, back to the music of love mentioned in the great poems of Rumi. This is a rich and rewarding book.
– Robert Adamson
There is something special about Lia Hills’ poetry, something ineffable that takes flight ‘out of the humus of emergent things’.
– Greg Delanty