The Grasscutters
POEMS
Jo Gardiner
Publication date
ISBN:
May
2026
978-1-923248-24-3
About the author
Jo Gardiner’s life has been enriched by the experience of living in many different and loved places—from Naracoorte in South Australia where she was born, to Hamilton, Dandenong and Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, and Bendemeer and Armidale on the New England Tablelands, to Paris, and the Blue Mountains. For more than thirty years now, she has lived with immense joy in a garden on Gundungurra and Dharug country in the Blue Labyrinth—a constant presence in her work which seeks the light of the natural world.
She has relished opportunities to work with extraordinary poets like Mark Tredinnick, Judith Beveridge, Jennifer Maiden, Brook Emery, and to study with Anna Gibbs and Cassandra Pybus. She holds a PhD in Communication and Media from Western Sydney University.
Her work has featured in the inaugural Robert Gray Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Woorilla Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the Island Nonfiction Prize, the Fish Short Story Prize, the Comstock Review (USA), and the Malahat Review Novella Prize (Canada).
Her fiction has appeared in Meanjin and Westerly, with a novel, The Concerto Inn (UWA Publishing), appearing in 2006. Her debut poetry collection, The Impossible Shore (Vagabond Press) was published in 2024. The Grasscutters is her second book of poetry.
About the book
The Grasscutters is many things, but before all else it is a book that pays attention—to landscape, to people, to other creatures, to what has happened or is happening within the poet's head. As Judith Beveridge has said, Jo Gardiner's poems "work to discover value and meaning in the world through the redemptive power of perception and observation." The result is an unlaboured originality—an originality which is not born of a straining to be different, but which is a necessary consequence of the witnessing and reporting of particular phenomena by a sensitive and idiosycratic intelligence.
This observational practice provides the feedstock for The Grasscutters. But it is Gardiner's mastery of her craft that makes this collection the triumph that it is. Her well-chosen and revelatory images, her command of language and rhythm, her sensitive matching of form and content and her meticulous attention to detail combine to draw the reader into the experiences she depicts. The result is that time and time again we find something that we thought familiar transfigured into something stranger, fresher and more full of meaning. By repeating this small miracle throughout the book, Gardiner re-enchants the world.
Jo Gardiner’s The Grasscutters offers many deep pleasures: language raised to an extraordinary power; the poems’ spirited roaming of inward and outward spaces—from the exotic to the domestic, from the mind to the body. These are poems of memory and presence; they originate in hard-won negotiations between life’s joys and its negations, the give-and-take inherent in being alive. I’d rather read Jo Gardiner’s poetry than just
about anyone’s because of her verbal finesse, because language in her hands has the jolting effect of a sudden wave, the heady perfume of gardenia, a sky of shooting stars.
--JUDITH BEVERIDGE
You brush your teeth at the railing, rinse, and spit
into shadows where the fireflies’
insistent script, like windblown foam,
scatters those things that lie beyond the rocky reef
of language, and that can only be understood
in the sheltered cove of night, a home
anchored inside the soft pouch of sleep, and in the scent of lines
of salt written on your skin.
from "Boat House"