Paul Hetherington
Ragged Disclosures
Recent Work Press, 2022
Ragged Disclosures is a prose poetry collection that investigates liminality, intersubjectivity and the prose poetic sequence. These sequences combine to create a complex and distributed depiction of an intimate relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic in this era of climate change and political instability. As the volume considers the protagonists’ diverse experiences, it explores the development of connected poetic tropes while highlighting tensions between prose poetry’s compression and the countervailing tendency for sequential works to present an unfolding narrative arc. The inherent raggedness of the narrative gestures, combined with prose poetry’s condensed and suggestive boxes, is playful, contemporary and quintessentially poetic.
Burnt Umber
UWA Publishing, 2016
This elegant collection ranges across a variety of approaches and forms. A number of ekphrastic poems bookend the volume. These poems are rich in observation and interpretation, showing the poet's ability to recast visual form into language. There are also prose poems, some short while others are extended meditations. The poet's lightness of touch is evident in these works and in his ability to amalgamate love and loss, strangeness and familiarity. The large and the small are brought beautifully into balance and focus, most strongly in the moving section ‘Viscera: poems from WWII’. These poems achieve an intimacy and focus through the astute selections of details and image.
Throughout this volume, Hetherington achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity. He is a poet whose rhythms and tones give intimate shape to his language and to a compassonate and wise voice. These poems are attended by a deep sense of what language can achieve when it is imagistic, investigative and precise, and of what is possible when a poet has full control of their craft. - Judges’ comments
2017 - Shortlisted for The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
“In this expansive and exciting collection, Hetherington moves with power and grace through an impressive range of form and content. The poems burst with tense and detailed images, shot through with meditations on grief, absence and hope. The work in Burnt Umber is always controlled, and full of colour. Here is a poet at the height of his powers singing what it means to be alive.”
About the Author
Paul Hetherington has published 17 full-length collections of poetry and prose poetry, including Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, 2022) and Her One Hundred and Seven Words (Massachusetts: MadHat Press, 2021), along with a verse novel, 12 poetry chapbooks and two collaborative artist’s books. With Cassandra Atherton, he is co-author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press, 2020). He has also edited eight other volumes. He has won or been nominated for more than 30 national and international awards and competitions, recently winning the 2022 Ballina Region for Refugees Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize and the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. In 2014 he won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards for the best poetry book published in Australia and in 2017 he was shortlisted for the prestigious Kenneth Slessor Prize. He undertook a six-month Australia Council Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome in 2015–2016. Paul is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) and joint founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He founded the International Prose Poetry Group in 2014.
