In order to get more accurate results, our search has the following Google-Type search functionality:
If you use '+' in front of a word, then that word will be present in the search results.
ex: Harry +Potter will return results with the word 'Potter'.
If you use '-' in front of a word, then that word will be absent in the search results.
ex: Harry -Potter will return results without the word 'Potter'.
If you use 'AND' between two words, then both of those words will be present in the search results.
ex: Harry AND Potter will return results with both 'Harry' and 'Potter'.
If you use 'OR' between two words, then bth of those words may or may not be present in the search results.
ex: Harry OR Potter will return results with just 'Harry', results with just 'Potter' and results with both 'Harry' and 'Potter'.
If you use 'NOT' before a word, then that word will be absent in the search results.
ex: Harry NOT Potter will return results without the word 'Potter'.
Placing '""' around words will perform a phrase search. The search results will contain those words in that order.
ex: "Harry Potter" will return any results with 'Harry Potter' in them, but not 'Potter Harry'.
Using '*' in a word will perform a wildcard search. The '*' signifies any number of characters. Searches can not start with a wildcard.
ex: Pot*er will return results with words starting with 'Pot' and ending in 'er'. In this case, 'Potter' will be a match.
The Judith Wright Calanthe Award is Australia's most prestigious poetry prize. Its award to Michael Farrell marks him out as one of our most important poets. There is no one like him for his souped-up surrealism, the range of his images, his wit and playfulness, his satirical takes on contemporary life.
The title of his new collection Googlecholia alludes to the range of emotional affects and feelings that the internet induces: pleasure, satisfaction, joy, melancholy, anxiety, schadenfreude, boredom, nausea. As a many-armed search engine, Google represents both the boundless realms of the internet, and the reductive image of knowledge that we hold in our heads. Google presides (alongside Wikipedia) for Farrell, because of the ease of research it enables for poems: whether for a quote, an etymology, or a fact. Here its elements populate and drive the poetic imagination, creating realities in which anything might be related to something else, and the strange, the unsettling and the fantastic are the natural order of things.
The poems in Googlecholia include 'French Open', a portrait of John McEnroe in the midst of a Baudelairean-inflected match; 'Philip Emu', a rewrite of John Skelton's Tudor-era 'Philip Sparrow'; the ABBA-driven prose poem 'Grammatical Theme and "Dancing Queen"'; '"Fire" At The Pointer Sisters Factory', a David Ireland-style nickname extravaganza (and a Best of Australian Poems 2021 choice); '"Cars" Is Feeling Grateful', a status update via Gary Numan's 1979 hit of the same name; and 'Arthur Boyd Has Pink Teeth', inspired by an early painting of his.
'In the great tradition of queer Australian landscape poetics...Farrell recombines Australian ecology, history, and mythology into glorious, and very funky, new forms.' - Judith Wright Calanthe Award citation
'one of our most naturally protean writers, a quality perhaps more apt in this land than any other, given the simultaneity of white Federation with the rise of global mass media and the teeming biodiversity that evolved here well before all that' - Sydney Morning Herald