Reason & Lovelessness: Essays, Reviews and Encounters, 1980-2017

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Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. Hills major works include Broken Song: T G H Strehlow & Aboriginal Possession (2002) and Peacemongers (2015), a personal, extended meditation on war and atomic destruction, and those thinkers, in Asia especially, who sought to undermine the cultural foundations of tendencies to conflict and destruction. As a writer Hills voice is informed by Australian working-class and labourist vernaculars, inherited from his childhood, an education in arts, education and psychology at the Universities of Melbourne and London, wide reading across the Western canon, during more than forty years as a full-time writer, an enduring interest in the contribution of Asian thinkers, especially Tagore, to the world, and an insistence on the importance of a creative approach to literary form. As such, his voice is entirely unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible from the light presented. This collection of essays, reviews and reportage, some published for the first time, amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hills contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.

Reviews

This wonderful, mysterious and compelling collection of essays prompts us to consider Barry Hills unusual place in Australian letters The essays are like jewels in a necklace, each glistening with its own beauty but together making something of greater elegance. -- Tom Griffiths

A rich gift. Thirty two invitations to share the speculative adventures, in friendships, in family, in the world of politics and moral and spiritual commitment, of a man in his wholeness, wholly attending. An extraordinary revelation of the considered life.

Reason, as passionate analysis and the higher Reason of moral law, runs through this astonishing collection of essays as a lifeline cast to us in a loveless world bereft of justice. At last we have the proper lens for getting Barry Hill into focus: so varied and extensive is his accomplishment as a writerin poetry, fiction, social and cultural history, and criticismthat we need this book to gather together in one place an adequate reflection of all that achievement. This is Man Thinking, in Emersons phrasethe work of a finely honed intellect and a capacious spiritthat educates us in the full range of our humanity. Like DH Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and John Bergerall of whom he writes about cogentlyHill shows how a life of writing is a life of thinking, when both the mind and the heart are animated by love and by reason.

These are intimate, stylish essays. This collection showcases Barry Hills remarkable intellectual curiosity and erudition. From questions of belonging and attachment, to global challenges of survival, belief and knowledge, Barry unflinchingly pushes through new frontiers to reveal, with passion and precision, new ways of seeing and feeling.

Author Bio

Barry Hill was born in Australia and educated in Melbourne and London, where he worked as an educational psychologist and a journalist for The Age and the Times Educational Supplement. He left newspapers to write full-time in 1976; his first book, The Schools, won the National Book Council prize. Asa freelance columnist for The Age he established himself as the countrys first radio critic, and between 1980 and 2010 he wrote many works for ABC Radio National. His libretto Love Strong as Death was performed at The Studio at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. His fiction is widely anthologised, including in Chinese and Japanese translations. The Mood Were In: circa Australia Day 2004 won the Alfred Deakin Prize for the Essay. His acclaimed poetry includes Ghosting William Buckley (1993), and Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud (2012), which was shortlisted for the UK 2013 Forward Prize. In 2009 Hill was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor for The Australian, and between 2005 and 2008 a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne. He lives by the sea in Queenscliff with his wife, the singer-songwriter Rose Bygrave.