These are intimate, stylish essays. This collection showcases Barry Hill's remarkable intellectual curiosity and erudition. From questions of belonging and attachment, to global challenges of survival, belief and knowledge, Barry unflinchingly pushes through new frontiers to reveal, with passion and precision, new ways of seeing and feeling. --Julianne Schultz, Griffith Review *** Reason, as passionate analysis and the higher Reason of moral law, runs through this astonishing collection of essays as a lifeline cast to us in a loveless world bereft of justice. At last we have the proper lens for getting Barry Hill into focus: so varied and extensive is his accomplishment as a writer-in poetry, fiction, social and cultural history, and criticism--that we need this book to gather together in one place an adequate reflection of all that achievement. --Paul Kane, Vassar College *** Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. His major works include Sitting In (1992), Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), and Peacemongers (2014). Each book has been groundbreaking in different ways: deeply, originally researched, crossing genres, multi-disciplinary, combining the personal with the generically philosophical. As a writer Hill's voice is informed by his Australian working-class and militant union background, which has been distilled by his higher education. After a decade working as a teacher, educational psychologist, and a journalist in Melbourne and London, he has been writing full-time since 1976-mainly based in Queenscliff, Victoria, but with stints at the Australia Council flat in Rome, where he finished poetic/dramatic works on Lucian Freud and Antonio Gramsci, and returns to Central Australia. In recent decades he has deepened his studies in Chinese and Japanese, which is in keeping with his long-term interest in Buddhism. Hill's voice is unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible. This collection of essays, reviews and reportage amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hill's contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life. (Series: Literary Studies) [Subject: Memoir, Poetry, Literary Studies, History, Media Studies]