My new book Incandescence was launched yesterday at Fullers Bookshop in nipaluna / Hobart on the (supposedly) last day of Winter 2025.
It was such a joy and an honour to share the afternoon
with a packed room of friends, family, colleagues, comrades, poets, and
supporters, as Esther Ottaway and I read and talked about the collection.
Huge thanks to Fullers Bookshop, Esther Ottaway, Susanna
Fishburn, Penelope Clark, and Deb Terry for helping make the afternoon such a
success (and for capturing photos and videos I’m sharing below) — and to
everyone who came along to celebrate with me.
Below are the launch speeches in case you couldn’t get along,
or you can watch the 30 minute video here on YouTube if you’d prefer, (excuse the
intermittent café noise in the background).
I’ve shared some of the poems on Facebook in images and
videos over the previous few weeks so make sure you check them out by liking my
page Susan Austin Poet here.
There are plenty of books still available at Fullers, Hobart
bookshop or online via this website. Let me know what your favourite poem is!
Incandescence book launch – 31 August 2025, Fullers Bookshop, nipaluna / Hobart
Launch speech by Esther Ottaway for Susan Austin’s Incandescence
Good afternoon, it’s so wonderful to see such a big room
full of wonderful people here today and thank you for your support of Tasmanian
poetry.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the
land we are meeting on today, the Muwinina / Mouheneener people, and their
continuing custodianship and connection to this beautiful area where we are fortunate
to be live and work.
It’s a pleasure to welcome you here to the launch of Incandescence,
the luminous new poetry collection by one of Tasmania’s favourite poets and one
of just ten poets longlisted in this year’s Tasmanian Literary Awards, Susan
Austin.
Susan’s first book, Undertow, is one of my favourite
books of the last fifteen years, and has the great honour of looking like this,
all wrinkled, because it’s such a good book that I had to take it with me into
the bath – and that is the mark of an amazing book, right?!
And her verse novel which lays bare the experience of
infertility is another of my favourite books – so gripping, and incredibly
emotionally compelling. It was my great pleasure to share the day of the launch
of Dancing With Empty Prams with my own book about girls and women on
the spectrum, She Doesn’t Seem Autistic.
Today we celebrate a new book, and we honour a voice – one
that burns with insight, tenderness, humour, and fire. Many of you will know
Susan not only as a poet, but as a mental health occupational therapist, a
mother, an activist, and a generous member of our Tasmanian literary community.
Her work is deeply grounded in lived experience, giving us poems rich with
social observation, domestic detail, and honestly rendered experiences of
motherhood, memory, grief, resilience, and hope.
In Incandescence, Susan has crafted a collection that
arises from the everyday, while expanding into the universal. These themes of
parenting, caregiving, surviving a pandemic, holding a marriage together,
walking through grief, and making space for joy, even amid exhaustion, mean
that her poems glow with warmth and insight, even when they explore moments of
deep difficulty.
Susan’s poetry is also full of humour – sometimes gentle,
sometimes biting. We see it in the verb-filled, joyful, exhausting poem The
purposeful occupations of a two-year-old; I’ll read you the opening:
wall scribbling stick
poking
sand
throwing rash
cream smearing
toast tossing cup
tipping
crumb
swiping chewed
cashew spitting
clothes snipping bead
sucking
backyard
absconding roadside
dashing
and so on through to the end, where the child is
first story competing lap
wrestling
in-to-bed
protesting middle-of-the-night
calling
As well as formal poems, Susan invents her own forms, in one
instance a poem in the bars of a cage, in another a Venn diagram, where she
overlays the frustrations of two people in a relationship with their area of
commonality, to brilliant effect. There
is also portraiture of others beyond the family, fictional or near-fictional
characters painted with Susan’s clear-eyed insight and deep compassion as a
mental health occupational therapist.
Then there is a powerful Covid sequence, bringing back the heartbreaking
distancing of those years, as in Outsiders:
Mu husband returns from Flinders Island,
drops bread and milk at the door.
He stands three metres away, mask on, to talk.
My son runs to hug him.
We shout in unison –
No!
And Susan’s deeply incisive reflections of our modern lives,
as in Quality time, which I’ll read in full:
my iPhone –
Facebook
weather
calendar
emails
texts
news
my curved back
my slight frown
my two-year-old –
shaking
her red egg-shaped maraca
beaming
at me
until I
notice
her joy
This is Susan at her best – cutting to the bone of matters,
attuned to the disorientation of our contemporary lives, and capable of
capturing so much emotion in a handful of lines. These moments accumulate
throughout the collection: the relational, the bittersweet, the luminous. And
they reflect Susan’s gift for balancing vulnerability and strength, fragility
and fortitude.
Susan’s voice is important and clear – a voice you want to
return to. These poems are so often about seeing – really seeing – the world, others,
our children, ourselves. And they are a gift for all of us who are navigating
messy, beautiful, full-to-the-brim lives.
So please join me in congratulating Susan on the release of Incandescence. She is, indeed, a bearer of light, as she
engages us fully with the work of life and love. Please welcome Susan.
Thank you so much Esther, and thank you to Tim and Rohan and
Fullers Bookshop for hosting today’s event.
Poetry has always been with me.
I’ve been writing poetry since the age of eight. My mother
encouraged me by buying me a 240-page hardcover exercise book to record final
drafts in my neatest handwriting. My main goal in life was to fill that book up
with poems! This goal was interrupted somewhat after moving
to Brisbane when I was 17 to go to uni. I got involved with
environmental and social justice campaign groups, and became the co-ordinator
of a socialist youth group, at the same time as paying my way through a
high-course-load university degree by doing two or three part-time jobs. So not
much time for poetry! I finished my poetry book while traveling overseas for a
year when I was 25. It felt like I had achieved my life’s goal at age 25! The
poems in this book, and many of the poems that came after, plot my personal
development and many of my life experiences, and I really like having this sort
of record to look back over, although it’s not the reason I write poetry – it’s
just a bonus.
I'm so grateful to have released three books into the world,
with many thanks to all the people that have made that possible.
For those who aren’t familiar with my books, Undertow
largely grew out of experiences in my twenties. As a young woman learning the
ropes in a community mental health team and practicing occupational therapy with
a diverse range of people in a low socioeconomic area, and as a solo backpacker
traveling to many parts of the world, the poems in it cover travel,
relationships, mental illness, feminism, and lots in between.
Dancing with Empty Prams tells the story of a woman whose
plan to have a baby takes her on a journey she never expected. Long-listed for
this year’s Tasmanian Literary Awards, it's a verse novel inspired by infertility
experiences that had a big impact on my life in my early thirties.
My new book, Incandescence, is drawn largely from
experiences I’ve had over the last decade, my 40s. It’s a poetry collection
that illuminates the wonderful highs and the shattering lows of parenting, the
ways in which we connect or disconnect with each other, (including through the
early covid pandemic), the things and places we turn to for solace, and how we
can struggle within interpersonal relationships. While I deeply love nature, I
tend to be drawn to writing more about people, and like all my books, it looks
at people and our efforts to get by with compassion. I hope it enhances
understanding and connection between us.
Thanks to Tony, Pamela and Kate from my poetry circle for
being such supportive poetry peers, and to my book group for being the best
groupies ever. This book is dedicated to my husband Jeremy and my two darling
children, Katie and Rory, for their love, and being with me on the ride, and
for giving me so much to write about! Thanks to Ralph Wessman from Walleah
Press for publishing all three books, and for being a shining light for poets
in Tassie and elsewhere – he’s a true literary gem. Thanks also to my talented
friend Jen Lorrimar-Shanks who designed all three covers, with lots of toing
and froing about the designs, and to my gang of friends who provided artistic
opinion and input. For Incandescence, I have my lovely friend Pen Clark to
thank for the gorgeous leaf photo that illuminates the cover. Esther here has
been a trusty support and invaluable friend along both my poetry and parenting
journeys, and I have her and my other main poetry mentor and supporter, Dr Gina
Mercer, to thank for taking the time to edit, support and cheer on this
collection.
It's actually been published since early January, but my
life’s been pretty rocky earlier this year and I wanted to give it the launch
it deserved, so it’s taken some time to get here. I’ve been on a bit of a roll
with two books in two years but at this point, I don’t know if or when I will
publish another book. It’s for all these reasons that I am so very grateful
that you’ve come along today to celebrate the launch of Incandescence with me,
I really appreciate it.
So now I might read you a handful of poems from the book,
starting with one of the lighter ones.
Many of you might be able to think of a time when you set
out on a long day walk or a multi-day bushwalk and after a certain number of
hours – for me it’s usually about 5 hours of walking with a heavy pack on – you
start to wonder why you thought such a plan would be fun and your mind wanders
to all the other things you could be doing instead, which at the time all seem
so much more enjoyable, and sensible. This poem contains some advice for you,
at those times, take it or leave it, it’s up to you. (Advice for those who
find themselves doing long bushwalks for some crazy reason they can’t remember)
Does anyone find that the harder their life is, the more likely they
are to get the urge to share lovely photos of rosier moments on Facebook?
There’s a strange phenomenon going on there. I don’t post much on Facebook
anymore, and I’ve noticed not as many people do these days, but some years ago
after sharing some of my poems about parenting with a fellow poet, she said she
was surprised at the desperate tone and content of them because the photos I
posted on Facebook gave a lovely, smiling, happy impression of our lives and
she would never have guessed I was finding motherhood challenging. I laughed
and then shared the following poem that I had written about the difference
between a photo on Facebook and the actual experience. (Salmon ponds)
I spent the last 5 years running groups for people with
mental health issues at The Hobart Clinic, and during that time I taught and
practiced myself a lot of mindfulness and acceptance skills. This poem is
grounded in some of those practices. (Ode to a Park Bench)
I wrote this sonnet when I was feeling nostalgic for all the little
unnoticed milestones that pass by as our kids grow up – like the last time they
need us to push them on the swings or the last time they need us to cut up
their sausage for them. It was initially written
as a response poem to one of Esther’s lovely parenting sonnets, Sonnet for
Fifteen, in her beautiful and prize-winning collection “Intimate, low-voiced,
delicate things”. (Sonnet for lost lasts)
I wrote this poem to record some memories of my Nanna
Austin, and what she was like in her final years. It was inspired by a visit I
made to her when Rory was a baby. (Still has the touch)
The last poem I’ll share with you today is a bit of a
transition poem. For a long while it felt like all I was writing was shopping
lists, questions to ask child health nurses or text messages asking my husband when
he was coming home. Then I started to emerge from the chaotic early years and
was able to write this: (Ready for more than nursery rhymes).
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