Gawimarra: Gathering

Title: Gawimarra: Gathering
Author: Jeanine Leane
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

Shortlist: Poetry

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.

Judges’ report

Jeanine Leane’s collection Gawimarra: Gathering is a vital work of imagination which crafts, in three structurally profound sections, a vision for another way of being – both in community and in the world – beyond the institutional violence of this nation’s settler founding. Leane’s work is generous and deftly executed, braiding auto-poetics with sharply observed accounts of the museumisation and scholarly appropriations of an ineluctable First Nations history and culture. Weaving together the knowledge of her elders – a storied people – Wiradjuri language, and shining acuity for the form, Gawimarra: Gathering is an invitation to walk with Leane along new pathways of resistance and to recognise the reality of tangible alternatives to the way we live now.

Extract

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VPLA book photography by Sarah Walker