Sun Music

WINNER of the 2019 Prime Minister's Literary Awards

Shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award 2019

Judith Beveridge is one of Australia's most acclaimed poets, taught in high schools and universities, winner of the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards, a highly regarded critic, editor and teacher of poetry.

Sun Music is a definitive edition of her best-known and most important poems.

Sun Music collects Beveridge's best poems published over a thirty-year period, from 1987 to 2017. She has selected the poems from her award-winning collections, The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey, and included 33 new poems which build on and enhance her previous work. Beveridge is an exacting poet, precise and controlled, and her formal discipline gives added intensity to her expression of emotion. The combination of clarity and dramatic force, involving a supple use of language which registers the ebb and flow of feeling, makes her poetry immediately appealing and accessible. As she notes in her introduction to this collection, 'My writing can be kaleidoscopic, often baroque, but I hope also grounded and focused...I am drawn to poetry that has rich texture, and by this, I mean poetry that is distinctly metaphorical, detailed, musically complex, but also clear.'

'A poet whose gentle and exacting touch and sure-poetic skills bear witness to a broad human vision, capable of expressing and engendering compassion, insight and grace.' Michael Brennan, Poetry International

Read the rapturous review by Gregory Day in The Australian - review

'Filled with a plethora of living things—people, insects, animals, birds—these poems are vivid, insightful, and gorgeously poetic.' - Andrea Goldsmith, Australian Book Review - Books of the Year 2018

'Her poems are constructed from finely described details, most of which are tapped into place with simile or metaphor. The most memorable of them involve a rejection of cruelty, whether to humans or animals.' - Geoff Page, Australian Book Review - Books of the Year 2018

'Beveridge has a gift for finding ways to match the natural world in words.' - Gregory Day, Australian Book Review - Books of the Year 2018