Like To The Lark update

I’m excited to share the cover of Like To The Lark, my second poetry collection, out February 2, 2023 with Upswell Publishing!

Huge thanks to my publisher Terri-ann White and my editor Felicity Plunkett, and to Chil3’s Becky Chilcott and Betty Joy Richards for cover design (cover photo by moi).

I’d be stoked if you’d consider pre-ordering at Booktopia or, a bit later this year, Upswell Publishing.

‘Like To The Lark is Stuart Barnes’s poetic Back to Mine, an accumulation of lifetime fascinations with music and sound, form and transformation. Beginning with an apparition of a doomed world brooding over itself and ending with a kvelling globe, this long-awaited second collection from the winner of the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize plunges—‘What a plunge!’ (‘What a lark!’)—into seas, scoots across countries and hurtles towards space. Ghazal shapeshifts into pantoum, duplex, sonnet, sestina, terminal, Golden Shovel and more plus two new forms invented by Barnes—terse-set and flashbang. As influenced by popular culture as they are by classical mythology, these poems—by turns playful, serious, tender, bold, surprising and witty—are fearless in their explorations of rape, illness, death, remembrance, ecology, love and joy. While ‘Fog / and Grief preen’ over a serodiscordant gay couple, a phoenix-like Royal Poinciana declares ‘My breath is rooted in kindness’. Forged from and framed by conversations with Nick Drake, Gwen Harwood, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Robert Smith and others, Barnes’s poems sparkle with vivid lyricism and wild inventiveness, and summon great care for the way they tend and transmute trauma and illuminate the resilience of human and non-human beings.’