Here is a remarkable poet, in whom delicacy of language equals fineness of perception. She sings "as if", as though all barriers had vanished between self and the shimmering world. Lightness and modern pastoral pervade her cities, animated by birds, creatures of the spirit. -- Chris Wallace-Crabbe Judith Bishop is a poet of unusual delicacy, yet she can phrase aphoristic, even proverbial, knowledge with complete authority. Accordingly, she writes 'if the gods weaken, we'll be left alone on earth' and 'Don't cough,E: only listen. This is how the gods speak.' She is entitled to speak both for the gods and about them: her mind is extraordinarily refined. The coarsenesses of the world are confronted by clear-eyed analysis. Cortes's conquest of Mexico, as seen by his Aztec amanuensis, Dona Marina, shares lyric presence with a strangely quiet pantheism elsewhere in the collection. Throughout, a wholly original voice makes itself heard. -- Peter Porter 'We attend frail breakings. Hymn/to insufficiency,' says Judith Bishop in her dazzling debut, Event, a book that argues for an almost prayer-like attention to the details of a world that seems both our own and newly -- thrillingly -- strange: 'error orbits error,' the sacred routinely turns to ash, we betray ourselves and others equally. Against this backdrop, Bishop speaks to and for the human impulse to strive anyway, to '[search] for tenderness,' for transformation if not transcendence -- and yes, for joy: 'joy, which meant a life, which meant/its ending, soon or later; which emboldened both of us --' These are splendid poems indeed, whose intelligence, vision, and sheer beauty at every turn persuade. -- Carl Phillips

Winner of Victorian Premier's Literary Award - CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry 2008 and Queensland Premier's Poetry Award 2008.

Judith Bishop was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1972. Her poems have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in Poetry (2002-2004), an Academy of American Poets University Prize (2004), and the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize (2006), and they appear in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (ed. Judith Beveridge) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (ed. Dorothy Porter). She works as a Linguist/Project Manager with a speech technology company in Sydney.

Event After the Elements I. Desert Wind The Master of Ikebana It Begins Where You Stand Late in the Day Passage of Winter Precluded; or, Death Imagined The Indifferent II. Rabbit Dona Marina: Part I Rembrandt's Presentation in the Temple The Birds Reported from the South -- Vertigo Definition of a Place "And the Clouds Cleared the Sky ... " "The Heart, Arrested Muscle ... " Night Fire: A Letter III. Interval IV. The Vow The Shatter Rooms Have Before, Would Again Il Mostro di Firenze An Italian Piazza Savonarolas Alice Missing in Wonderland Agitation Dona Marina: Part II Threnody Affair Two Windows Apology V. Epistles Sorretto da Quattro Angeli On Arriving Still Life with Cockles and Shells Dona Marina: Part III Thanatos How to Speak of Love Issuance The Fireworks Maker of Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri Argument in White "The Chords of Snow Melting ..."