Books

The Heart’s Ground

Her mind was bright and darting, passionate and complicated, carrying many apparent contradictions. She had a glitter about her, a kind of lifelong mental exuberance.

Julia Hamer

Anne Elder was a dancer with the Borovansky Ballet in the 1940s, but gave up her career to have children.

Gaytana Adorno interviews Julia Hamer, author of the Heart’s Ground: Life of Anne Elder (Lauranton Books) and Catherine Elder, Editor of The Bright and The Cold: Selected poems of Anne Elder (Lauranton Books) on Southern FM’s WRITE NOW RIGHT NOW program Thursday February 14th, 2019.

David McLean interviews Julia Hamer, author of the Heart’s Ground: Life of Anne Elder (Lauranton Books) and Catherine Elder, Editor of The Bright and The Cold: Selected poems of Anne Elder (Lauranton Books) on 3CR’s PUBLISHED OR NOT PROGRAM Thursday February 24th January, 2019

Later in life she became a considerable poet, publishing verse that could be delicate or sinewy, elegiac or satiric, tender or biting, or something several things at once – but rarely conventional. Her writing career was cut short by illness, and she died at the age of fifty-eight.

This finely wrought biography portrays a woman of intense feelings and keen, sometimes lacerating perceptions. What were the sources of her great creative gifts? Were they traceable to her forebears or in some way connected to her mental instability? How should we think about her now, forty years later? These questions are threaded through the narrative, made exceptionally vivid by quotes from her poems and extensive family letters. 

The Heart’s Ground is available from Judith Buckrich and at Readings.
ISBN 978 0 99425 073 5
First published by Lauranton Books in 2018

The Bright and the Cold

For all Anne Elder’s tender lyricism, delicate shading and pastel mood, she holds in reserve, often for dramatic ending, the deadliness of a cobra.

Graham Rowlands

Anne Elder was a dancer with the Borovansky Ballet in the 1940s who later in life became a fine poet, compared by one critic to Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood. This new selection of her poems, compiled by her daughter Catherine Elder, is published alongside a vivid biography by Julia Hamer, The Heart’s Ground: A Life of Anne Elder.

It is time that this modest and exacting poet, and her delicate and vigorous poetry, took their place among the treasures of our readers and among Australian classics.

Judith Rodriguez 

The Bright and the Cold is available from Judith Buckrich and at Readings.
ISBN 978 0 99425 074 2
First published by Lauranton Books in 2018