Bookrate

A stunning new collection from one of Australia’s finest poets - her most impressive work yet. Winner of the 2023 Stella Prize With electrifying boldness and fearlessness of vision, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief. Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and compulsively probing the body’s animal endurance and appetites, along with the metamorphoses of long illness, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s distinctive lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice. In this collection Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising- these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is a devastating and mesmerising collection by a poet at the height of her powers.