Reason and Lovelessness : Essays, Encounters, Reviews 1980-2017

Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, history, biography, fiction and reportage. This collection of essays, variously published in Australia, India and London, includes 'satellites' of his major works--such as Sitting In (1992), a landmark memoir in Labour History; Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), a literary biography on Aboriginal and frontier poetics; and Peacemongers (2014), a pilgrimage book about Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in the years leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other essays are new: 'Brecht's Song', on his working-class mother; 'Dark Star', an expansion of his meeting with Christina Stead on her 80th birthday; 'Loving Roughneck', his critical appreciation of John Berger; and 'On the Edge of the Cliff', on his private meeting with the Dalai Lama in the Blue Mountains. As has been the case with his book-length works, Hill's essays collected here are ground-breaking: freshly, deeply researched, genre-crossing, multi-disciplinary, combining the candidly personal with the philosophical.