Join us for the launch of Within Reach by Russell Erwin (Gazebo/Life Before Man), with readings from special guests Geoff Page and John Foulcher.

Within Reach draws on the unsentimental attentiveness of rural life, where close observation, quiet resilience, and wry humour shape the everyday. Russell Erwin’s poems move between the sensuous and the elegiac, capturing love, loss, and the shifting presence of the natural world. Echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, and a formative teacher linger in this deeply grounded and finely tuned collection.

Russell Erwin is a poet and farmer based in the Southern Tablelands. Within Reach is his sixth collection and his first since Maps of Small Countries (Gininderra Press, 2016). Erwin’s earlier works include Clear Hills, Empty Sky (Polonius Press, 1994), Taken by the Enemy (Molonglo Press, 2000), From Here (Gininderra Press, 2001), and the privately published Notes for an Imminent Arrival (2013).

Geoff Page grew up on a cattle station on the Clarence River in northern NSW. In addition to twenty-four collections of poetry, Geoff has published two novels, five verse novels, several anthologies, two books of translation and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. His awards include the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry, the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award and as well as the 2017 and 2020 ACU Poetry Prize. Selections from his work have been translated into seven languages.

John Foulcher has written thirteen books of poetry. His twelfth book, Dancing with Stephen Hawking (Pitt Street Poetry 2021), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize in 2022. His work has appeared in Australian magazines and anthologies over nearly forty years, and he has featured in many award lists, including the National Library Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood poetry, the Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Bridport International Poetry Prize. In 2010-11 he was the Literature Board of the Australia Council’s resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris.