Connie Barber – June 4 2017

World Oceans Day – June 8 2017

Connie has worked as both a painter and poet. Her work was first published in 1980 and has since been published widely in Australia and overseas: in print, online and on radio. She has won the Ian Mudie Award and SWW International Year of Peace Award, and has been short-listed twice for The Newcastle Poetry Prize. Born in Sydney in 1922, Connie started training as a professional artist in the late 1930s. She studied art at Melbourne Technical College and graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in 1951. After joining the Australian Women’s Army Service during WWII she was recruited by the British Foreign Office and worked for them in Melbourne then in London. Connie’s other published poetry collections include Budgerigah Flying, Enter Your House with Care and Sand. She is still a practising visual artist.

The Edge of Winter
Ginninderra Press, 2015; ISBN 9781740279956
‘The Edge of Winter is a remarkable achievement by one of our oldest living poets. The poems reveal an inquisitive mind fascinated by the physical world, including particularly the ocean and the Merri Merri Creek, in Melbourne’s north. Connie Barber interrogates herself and the world through which she moves with a clean-edged honesty leavened often by humour and self-deprecation … These are clear and lucid poems on the surface, but they are remarkable for the depth of thought, and sometimes of anguish, that informs them. It is a book in which “words fall / beyond sound and sing”.’ – Ron Pretty

Between Headlands
Five Islands Press, 2006; ISBN 9780734036490
In these powerfully reflective poems, Connie Barber takes us on a visionary journey, examining aspects of place and transitions, the environment and loss, memory and the present. This collection of her poetry is divided into five subject groups: ‘The Great Ocean and The Sea’, ‘Opposition and Openings’, ‘Those Mysterious Invasions’, ‘No More People’ and ‘Passages’. The front cover features her painting, ‘American Bay, Kangaroo Island’, reflecting her interest and fascination with the natural world.