Book launch (NSW): Song in the Grass by Kate Fagan

Please join us for a celebration of Song in the Grass, the new collection by award-winning poet, singer-songwriter and musician Kate Fagan, her first in over a decade. Released by Giramondo in June 2024, this book of ‘transformations, praisesongs and cleavings’ (Gail Jones) 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.

Song in the Grass will be launched by poet and scholar Professor Ann Vickery on Thursday 29 August at the Margaret Whitlam Galleries in Parramatta. The event will feature live music and readings, and will take place against the backdrop of Western Sydney Creative’s Word Up! exhibition (1 August – 1 November), which features 40 artworks from Western Sydney University’s permanent collection that combine image, digital media and text.

In her author note, written not long before the book was released, Fagan wrote: ‘I’ve been lucky in recent years to work with a splendid group of musicians and performers for whom I’ve written lyrics as kernels for compositions… I’d love readers also to hear the music those poems inspired, and by which they are shaped.’

We are therefore thrilled to have composer Clare Maclean at Fagan’s launch to speak briefly on her composition ‘Winnowing Light’, which she scored from Fagan’s poem ‘Evening Devotional’. This will be followed by a performance of the composition by Jason Noble and Claire Edwardes, from leading Australian contemporary music group Ensemble Offspring. Kate will also perform a song by eminent composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford, based on her poem ‘Our Mother’s Heart’.

Copies of Song in the Grass will be available for purchase on the night through Giramondo, with light refreshments provided.

This event is free, but RSVP is essential as space is limited. Please register on this page as soon as possible to avoid missing out.

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EVENT DETAILS

Date: Thursday 29 August
Time: 5.30pm for a 6pm start
Location: Margaret Whitlam Galleries, Female Orphan School, Western Sydney University Parramatta Campus, Parramatta NSW 2116
Cost: Free, RSVP essential

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ABOUT SONG IN THE GRASS

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.

Order the book.

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ABOUT KATE FAGAN

Kate Fagan is a writer, musician and scholar whose third volume, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year Award. She directs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers from Western Sydney. She is currently Director of the WSU Writing and Society Research Centre and Chair of the Sydney Review of Books Advisory Board. Her latest book is Song in the Grass.

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ABOUT ANN VICKERY

Ann Vickery is a Melbourne-based poet and feminist scholar. She is a Professor of Writing, Literature & Culture at Deakin University and co-lead of the Literature & Its Readers research cluster. She co-founded the Australasian Modernist Studies Network (with Lorraine Sim and James Smith) and was a founding member and editor-in-chief of HOW2: A Journal of Innovative Writing and Scholarship. She has been a past poetry editor of Puncher and Wattmann and continues to be a consulting editor. She has also been managing editor of Journal of Poetics Research and is a member of Deakin’s Contemporary Histories Research Group.

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