Naked Clay

'Naked Clay' is an intimate response to the paintings of Lucian Freud-"the great amplifier of twentieth century figurative art"' as the critic Sebastian Smee has written. The poems are as urgent as the paintings, and taken together they constitute an essay on the ambiguous gifts from a painter of such mortal, material presences. Barry Hill has created a unique space for the senses and the intellect to be prompted, explored and disturbed.

Barry Hill was born in Melbourne in 1943, and completed his tertiary education in Melbourne and London, where he worked an educational psychologist and a journalist. He has been writing full time since 1975, living by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria. He has won major national awards for poetry, history and the essay. He has written many pieces for radio. His libretto, Love Strong as Death was performed at 'The Studio', at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. Broken Song: T G H Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf 2002), his magnum opus on Australian poetics, which won a National Biography Award and the 2004 Tasman-Pacific Bi-Centennial Prize for History, has been described as 'one of the great Australian books.' In 2008 he won the prestigious Judith Wright Prize for his reflections on revolutionary romanticism, Necessity: Poems 1996 - 2006. Along with As We Draw Ourselves (2007) this book also includes his responses to living in Italy, and his Buddhist travels in India and East Asia. Lines for Birds (2011) is a collaboration with the painter, John Wolseley. Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, is his ninth collection. Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor of the national newspaper, The Australian and between 2005 and 2008 he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is currently the recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship, which enables him to spend time in Kyoto and Calcutta while writing a book called The Peace Pagoda, about the travels of Rabindranath Tagore in Japan.