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Throughout his forties and fifties Phillip found himself on a sticky wicket: the grief for his baby son and younger brothers, suicide attempts, self-harming, the premature termination of his career, and the failure of religious belief to explain or console. In and out of psychiatric care, he has been treated for PTSD, severe depression and social anxiety. There are consolations: family, companion greyhounds, Sunshine, the Western Bulldogs and Australian Football, books, the fine and performing arts but, for Phillip, this remains a time of loss and despair. This is, therefore, a collection of lamentations, achingly focused on what it is to live with poor mental health, but it is also a defiant celebration of survival and the redeeming power of familial love, sport and the arts.

Hybrid Heaven & Other(ed) Poems is a bold, genre-defying collection that maps the textures of diasporic identity across continents, cultures, and histories. Moving between Canberra, Leighton Buzzard, Accra, Kingston, and beyond, Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss stitches together fragments of memory, music, migration, and myth into a vivid poetic tapestry.
From batik to Doc Martens, from ska, hip hop and punk to Walcott, Gilroy and Brathwaite, these poems remix the past and present into a living, breathing archive. Languages collide, geographies blur, and identities are worn, reworn and remade, sometimes in tension, always in motion.
At once personal and planetary, Hybrid Heaven explores what it means to belong across multiple worlds: to be stitched from routes as much as roots, to navigate histories of displacement and survival, and to transform fracture into form.
This is poetry as tailoring, as excavation, as sound system, where every line carries the rhythm of a life lived between, beyond, and through.

‘As affected by a work as they are by a word, as attentive to the world as they are to the body, as absorbed in other languages as they are in her mother tongue, these poems balance “lull’”and “leap”, “shadow” and “light”, “violence” and compassion. They are serious and witty, controlled and fervent, lyric and experimental. Errances is a smart, unswerving and dazzling collection.’
Stuart Barnes

“Paolo Totaro’s Collected Poems were published in 2012. Taken together, the Collected Poems constituted the work of more than sixty years, spanning the period from 1950 to 2011—‘all my adult life,’ as Totaro wrote in his foreword. Except that there was, and there is, more life to come, and with it a startling concentration of poems. In the thirteen years since his Collected Poems, Totaro has written as much poetry as he did in the sixty preceding years. This new book collates that remarkable yield.

In so doing, this book belies the preoccupation of many of the poems with infirmity and impermanence. For every presentiment of mortality or every shift of feeling towards resignation, there is a counterpoise, perhaps an observation or intuition or aphorism, or simply an expression of mood, which refreshes the poet’s sensitivity to a vital spark. For all the eclecticism of this volume—Totaro’s wit, the breadth of his intellectual interests and the variety of his expressive modes are undiminished—its chief motive is an insistence on life for life’s sake.”

From the Introduction by Theodore Ell