A dazzling new poetry collection from award-winning poet Judith Bishop, a conclusion to her trilogy focused on time.
Perched on a tablecloth with glasses
for a summer drink- life, on its haunches
like a kitten, thoughtful.
Extending a paw- What happens if?
Circadia is a shattering testament to the fragility of life and the weight of the present. Exquisitely attuned to atmosphere and emotion, Judith Bishop's poems grieve the daily devastations of war, extinction, illness, death, and disconnection, yet find their way back into clearings transfigured by the energies of art, children, and the sheer incandescence of existence.
These fiercely empathetic poems range deep into the woods of present, past and future time. With visionary imagination and rapt musicality, this concluding volume in Bishop's award-winning trilogy on time sings in the mind long after reading.
About the Author :
Judith Bishop was born in Melbourne, Australia, and has lived in the United States and Britain. Her poems have won a number of awards, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets University prize and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She is the author of two collections- Event (Salt Publishing, 2007), which won the FAW Anne Elder award and was shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the ASAL Mary Gilmore Prize; and Interval (UQP, 2018), which won the NSW Premier's Literary Awards - Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature - Best Writing Award.
She is also the author of three chapbooks- Alice Missing in Wonderland and other poems (Picaro Press, 2008), Aftermarks (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Here Hear (Gazebo Books, 2022). Her translations from French (Philippe Jaccottet, Gerard Mace) have been published in Australian and international journals. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne, an MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MPhil in European Literature from the University of Cambridge. She lives with her family in Melbourne.
Review :
'Mythic, fragmentary and fable-like, the stunning poems of Circadia pay deep attention to the world and its grievous losses, seeking a language that corresponds to, and speaks from, our compromised present. Bishop is my favourite kind of poet: one who understands what is essential. Her poems seem to emerge from the elements themselves, distilled through long thinking, and honed by an exacting mind. Reading them, you feel you are entering into another atmosphere: cooler, sharper, more intense than the usual weather. I would follow her poems anywhere.' - Sarah Holland-Batt
'Circadia is full of reflections and glances, shadows and shades, conveyed with a musical precision. Yet its real subject is the living body: not only the human body, but our ailing planet of breathing oceans and thinking forests.' - Andrew Ford
'From its opening pages, Circadia tenderly invites us to be stretched by the vigorous elasticity of the mundane. How can we call a day a "day"? It is "life, on its haunches, like a kitten"; it is, as time goes by, "something other than the season, something other than the air"; it is also, inevitably, recognizing the "hearts of the unborn" saying "Love! Love!". Circadia beautifully attunes us to the everyday vibrancy of life and the magnetic magnanimity of time.' - Belle Ling
'In these fulgent, quietly insistent lyrics, the world is orchestral and fugitive, fragile if laced with chastening distances, deafening us with the hush of a winter day. A passionate poet whose work has become a dawn chorus unto itself, Bishop is ecstatic at the here and now, "the once-upon tree" of transfiguration, awe at the edge of our skin. We are held-and beheld-by others, she sings, and owe our being to them. As they to us. Look, listen, lift and go: "No one should break the presence / of another to the sun."' - Andrew Zawacki
