Grass Hut Work

Author: Barry Hill
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Category: Poetry By Individual Poets
Book Format: Paperback

In the ancient tradition of poet-as-traveler-and-seer, Barry Hill's Grass Hut Work is, like Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, both a travelogue of Japan and a journey inward, into what we'll call the Soul-for lack of a better word. He sees with fresh eyes the merger of history and presence, and presents us vital insight at every turn. In the grass hut, he says, I strive to be nobody, and thereby becomes an everyman, an exemplar, a master and unsui, a beginner. Beautiful and quietly powerful, this is work to return to again and again.

-Sam Hamill

About Barry Hill

Barry Hill was born in Melbourne in 1943, and completed his tertiary education in Melbourne and London, where he worked an educational psychologist and a journalist. He has been writing full time since 1975, living by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria. He has won major national awards for poetry, history and the essay. Penguin and Faber have anthologized his short fiction, and stories have been translated into Chinese and Japanese. He has written many pieces for radio. His libretto, Love Strong as Death was performed at The Studio, at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. Broken Song: T G H Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf, 2002), his magnum opus on Australian poetics, which won a National Biography Award and the 2004 Tasman-Pacific Bi-Centennial Prize for History, has been described as 'one of the great Australian books'; it was reviewed in the TLS in 2003. His poetry has been published in the Kenyon Review, The Literary Review and Agenda, as well as the major literary magazines in Australia, including the annual anthologies, Best Australian Poems. In 2008 he won the prestigious Judith Wright Prize for his reflections on revolutionary romanticism, Necessity: Poems 1996-2006. Along with As We Draw Ourselves (2007) this book also includes his responses to living in Italy, and his Buddhist travels in India and East Asia. Lines for Birds (2011) is a collaboration with the painter, John Wolseley. Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, was his ninth collection, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2012. His tenth collection, Grass Hut Work, was published by Shearsman in 2016, and was written while he was living in Kyoto, researching Peacemongers (UQP, 2014), his most recent prose work. Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor of the national newspaper, The Australian and between 2005 and 2008 he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He lives by the sea near the Southern Ocean.