Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing – is the first collection of its kind to be published in Australia.  The editors have selected a broad range of Australian poems which explore the universal experience and effects of ageing.  Whether the poets are witnessing themselves or their parents and friends succumb to the years, they speak with great precision and insight into illness, frailty, death, loss, grief and retirement as well as the joys and the wisdom that late maturity can bring.  There is humour as well as sadness in this fine and important collection, which includes the work of some of Australia’s best loved poets, a volume to be cherished by readers of any age.

Dr Susan Ogle is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine and geriatrician at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney and has recently completed a Masters of Medical Humanities.  Susan has been interested in medical education for many years, using literature (stories and poetry), patient and family narratives and role play.  She is co-editor of Reflection, the humanities section of the Australasian Journal on Ageing.  Her poetry has been  published in literary and medical journals.

Judith Beveridge is the author of six volumes of poetry, most recently Devadatta’s Poems and Hook and Eye.  She is the poetry editor of Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at postgraduate level at the University of Sydney.  She has won many prizes for her poetry including the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award.  Her work has been studied in schools and universities and has been translated into several languages.

Review

“This collaboration, not least in the judicious though wide-ranging choice of poems makes Falling and Flying one of the most distinguished of recent specialised verse anthologies – if that is the word for the manifold delights and miseries that these “Poems on Ageing” trace.” …… Click here to read more of this review by Peter Pierce in the Sydney Morning Herald – 22 January 2016. (the link is courtesy of Fairfax Media)