Winner of the Interactive Press poetry manuscript award 2008

The poems in Lia Hills’ first collection, the possibility of flight, journey from ‘artesian memories’ of the Australian desert to the ‘shifting territory of the gods’ in rural Pakistan, investigating where we seek out meaning as they move between love, language and faith.

‘There is something special about Lia Hills’ poetry, something ineffable that takes flight ‘out of the humus of emergent things’.’ – Greg Delanty, Guggenheim Fellow and Oxford poet.

‘Lia Hills is a poet who takes lyric poetry and fills it with philosophical nous. Her vision begins with intimacy, then looks outward - taking in phenomena - a ‘song rises in search of a tongue’ and ‘absence travels the duskpaths’ until the poet realises it is the emptiness that sings’. The language is sparse and musical. The subjects range from war to ‘memory games’, love and family. This is a rich book and with each re-read I was rewarded with the deeper meanings under the mannered surface of the craft. In this book Hills takes a flight from the moral self, out over the possibilities of prayer and the imagination, back to the music of love mentioned in the great poems of Rumi. This is a rich and rewarding book.’ – Robert Adamson, winner of The Age Poetry Book of the Year 2007.

Available at Collected Works, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St, Melbourne

To order copies from Interactive Press see: ipoz.biz/Store/orders.htm

Extract from the possibility of flight:

an anatomy of birds

You found it in the humus

of emergent things, its

feather skull one hundredth

of its skyborne weight, grey

treasure gone, keel clung to

its breast no longer obliged

to guide and pitch, your fingers,

still with their flesh, decadent

against this picked white, your

density fondling its hollowness,

the cavities that once dissected

light, one feather fixed to its

ladder spine, Jurassic toes coiled

to their fate, your hand defies the

giant’s requisite to crush, this fragile

survey of the possibility of flight.