The Jaguar

De: Sarah Holland-Batt

Narrado por: Geraldine Hakewill

With electrifying boldness and fearlessness of vision, Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief. Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

Here, Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising – these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is an indelible collection by a poet at the height of her powers.

2023 Stella Prize Winner

©2022 Sarah Holland-Batt. Published by arrangement with University of Queensland Press (P)2024 Bolinda Publishing

Reseñas de la Crítica

'Few poets can achieve this level of transformation, allowing their images to move with argumentative force ... The poems about her father are among some of the most powerful written on this subject and many readers will be profoundly affected by them. Holland-Batt has produced a powerful and sustained work, a book that I will keep returning to for its rich haul of images, its intensity of emotion, the pleasure of its finely wrought music and its elegant craft.' (The Australian)

'Lyrical and beautiful. [These poems] are intelligent, fierce and fearless.' (The Weekend Australian)

'A confronting and heartfelt elegy for her father, bookended by the devastating end of his life but not forgoing the vivid living of the rest of it - capturing his humanity, his illness and her loss with clarity and love.' (The Guardian)

'A key figure in contemporary Australian poetry.' (The Sydney Morning Herald)

'A searingly honest exploration of her father's battle with Parkinson's disease ... Her poems are rich, beautiful and autobiographical. Each one is a story, a world within a world.' (The Courier Mail)