Released 30th June, 2024 // 36 pages // 978-1-916938-28-1 // RRP £8.99
Emily Barker's debut poetry pamphlet Where the Black Swans Swim is a thing of wild and restless joy. It is full of wonder, curiosity, music and the ache of memory and displacement. These are poems of love for the natural world, of the fragility and beauty of the creatures that populate it and the human creatures who are so often its despoilers, and which seek to understand its place, and its place in us. This is a luminous book of poetry.
PRAISE for Where the Black Swans Swim:
Where The Black Swans Swim is an exciting and big-spirited debut that faces our burning world with compassion, wit, and energy. While these poems are richly evocative of place, Barker comes to the task of writing with a proper regard for those who are edged to the limits of physical space and moral concern. These are poems of lively and committed attention that seek to celebrate life's strangeness, even as they mourn its passing. Intelligent and playful, Where The Black Swans Swim is, in some measure, an ecological accounting, but it is also full of rangy lyric jouissance and abundant tenderness for everything we've lost, and all that is worth saving.
— Fran Lock
Three languages flow riverine through Emily Barker’s debut; her English, the language of music and the Indigenous Noongar language that is rooted deep in the landscape she grew up in. These are potent poems of patterning and erasure, restoration and honouring that sing from the tongue and live long in the head and heart.
— Adam Horovitz
Hard-won and exquisitely crafted poems form this outstanding debut pamphlet from Emily Barker. These poems shift between the beautiful and vast coastal landscape of Australia, its Indigenous people and their language and its creatures of earth and sea, and a small inland English town. Where is home? asks the poet. The scale of this work is vast, reflecting a life spent travelling the world as a musician This is brave and tender poetry. Rarely does one read a collection so accomplished, generous and heartfelt.
— Vanessa Lampert
ABOUT Emily Barker:
Emily Barker is an award-winning Australian singer-songwriter. She had early success as the writer and performer of the theme to BBC/PBS Masterpiece crime drama Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh and has since gone on to forge an acclaimed catalogue of releases. Barker has released music and toured as a solo artist as well as with various bands and collaborations. She has written for TV and film, including composing the soundtrack for Jake Gavin’s lauded debut feature Hector starring Peter Mullan. Where the Black Swans Swim is her debut collection of poems.
