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Russell Erwin's Within Reach is a collection of rare depth and sensory precision - a life distilled through seven decades of close looking, quiet grief, and hard-won wonder. Erwin, a poet and farmer from the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, brings to his sixth collection the unsentimental attentiveness of someone who has learned to read both land and loss without flinching.
The collection moves through seven numbered sections, each illuminated by an epigraph that sets an emotional compass: from a childhood spent in the polyglot playground of postwar Villawood, where immigrant kids arrived "with funny first names, funny voices, or no voice at all," to elegies for both parents rendered with devastating restraint; from the party-line gossip and drought-marked seasons of a working sheep property to a sustained bestiary of native birds - wedge-tails, grey fantails, funereal cockatoos, silvereyes - observed with the precision of a naturalist and the love of a poet.
Erwin's style owes evident debts to Gerard Manley Hopkins (the sprung vigour of his language), Seamus Heaney (the mud-gripped rootedness in place), and his long-time champion Les Murray (the moral weight given to the ordinary and the rural). Yet the voice is unmistakably his own: wry, tender, never soft, never sentimental. A poem about getting tangled in a jumper becomes a meditation on confinement. A childhood schoolyard print of Murillo - "death-grubby urchins, / grained in their poverty" - lodges for a lifetime.
Poems in this collection have appeared in Quadrant and in Best Australian Poems 2017, and the collection was launched at Smith's Alternative, Canberra, in April 2026, with readings from poets Geoff Page and John Foulcher.
Within Reach is a major work by one of Australia's most quietly accomplished contemporary poets.
