Amongst all the very worthy longlistees of the Tasmanian Literary Awards 2022, it’s particularly nice to see Tim Slade’s collection of poems, The Walnut Tree. I am proud to have published this book under the Bright South imprint. The Walnut Tree has been longlisted for the inaugural Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry.* (You can read more about Tim Thorne here.)
Bright South is a one-person operation, so it’s not exactly a prolific publisher of books, but the imprint publishes writing that matters, which deserves to meet a wider audience than it otherwise might. Tim Slade’s poems speak of a Tasmania that is familiar, yet too frequently barely noticed. Between clamorous ‘problems and needs’, on the one hand, and a breathtaking Helen of a landscape (that the world wants a piece of), there are thoughtful, feeling, striving, ethical people who still perceive the littleness of the human world in a larger scheme of things. They are a people who also lack no small measure of quirk, for how can a person not laugh at much of the sheer silliness of humans? You will find such people under the covers of Tim Slade’s ‘Walnut Tree‘. If you’d like to meet them, you can find the book in local bookshops, and various other outlets, as well as in libraries, and in the shop section of this website.
If you’d like to know more about The Walnut Tree and why Bright South published it, you can find that here (including a few poems).
You can also hear Warwick Hadfield read ‘Thylacine’, from The Walnut Tree, on ABC Radio National, here.
Or, if that appeals, you like to watch Tim himself recite ‘Thylacine’ in situ, in Thylacine country, lutruwita-Tasmania.