Gawimarra by Jeanine Leane

A stunning work of poetry from an award-winning First Nations writer, seamlessly weaving the personal and the political.

This superb collection moves from deeply tender meditations on Country, culture and kinship, to experimental archival poems dissecting the violence and destruction of the settler-colony. Jeanine Leane’s poems are richly palpable in texture, imagery and language, layering the personal with the political, along with a sharp-tongued telling of history. Cleverly divided into three parts, ‘Gathering’, ‘Nation’ and ‘Returning’, Gawimarra weaves back and forth in a dedication to strong matriarchs, and the core acts of gathering and returning – memory, language, history – resonate powerfully throughout. This remarkable book is the result of decades of poetic, political, and cultural work and reflection.

A stunning work of poetry from an award-winning First Nations writer, seamlessly weaving the personal and the political.

About the Author: Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west New South Wales. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming- A.D. 1887-1961, won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry, and her first novel, Purple Threads, won the David Unaipon Award. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative nonfiction. Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Poetry twice. In 2023 she won the David Harold Tribe Award for Poetry, Australia’s richest poetry prize. She has been the recipient of a Red Room Poetry Fellowship and two Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowships. Jeanine taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature for many years at the University of Melbourne, where she is currently First Nations Writer in Residence.

30 Jan 2024
 

Gawimarra: Gathering by Jeanine Leane ISBN 9780702266324