Product Description
Like its precursor Barnacle Rock, Brief Garden is a collection of poems largely concerned with environmental degeneration and loss. The title poem deals with the ephemeral nature of a civilisation and its artefacts, but the focus of the collection goes deeper, playing on the word “brief”, the vanishing of an Edenic garden. Today, our world is further threatened by anthropogenic climate change, oil-mining assaults on natural wonders, flora and fauna, and by continued government intervention into the preservation of heritage buildings and sites. The land tended by Australia’s first inhabitants for 60,000 years is now under siege. In these beautifully crafted and researched poems, voices from the past and present remind readers of what has been taken away.
REVIEWS
“In Brief Garden, Bradstock asks us many questions. Often these involve the role of violence in the dispossession of First Nations, but she is also interested in dramatizing the abuse of power and penal threats that pervaded so many displaced colonial lives. Bradstock is a poet of environmental and psychological degeneration and loss as she documents the consequences of living in a vanishing Edenic garden.” PHILLIP HALL, Plumwood Mountain Journal
“This book has no belly laughs but bucketloads of smiles. There is no hectoring but an abundant insight. After reading it we feel helped through the grief and can march forward with a quiet determination.” LES WICKS, Rochford Street Review
