The Grass is Greener Over Your Grave

(Paperback)

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If Cookes previous book, Lyre, urged us towards the more of the more-than-human world, then The grass is greener over your grave returns to the human end of that spectrumthough always with an eye to the porosity of the human and its immersion in waves of land, language, dream, and sea. Typically wide-ranging in form, this new collection develops Cookes preoccupations with colonisation, ecology, metaphysics, and travel, while also acknowledging their heritage in the life and work of the late poet Martin Harrison.

'An extended elegy to a late friend and mentor, this is a culmination of the phenomenological and fiercely attentive place-based writing that has preoccupied Cookes work to date. Traces of other local poetic influences Phillip Hodgins, Jennifer Rankin and John Anderson are visible and audible in Cookes eventful treatment of the prose line and internal rhyme. There is, too, the emergence of a tougher, cooler voice; at times self-satirising, reminiscent of John Mateers personae, Cooke brings forward a lyric character who treads these poems with ironic scrutiny, reflecting the authors ongoing work at the crossroads of non-Indigenous language and culture.' Bonny Cassidy