Chris Wallace-Crabbe, one of Australia's best-loved poets, writes in Rondo a book that distils his life-long themes of nature, time and love; he is civilised but also relentless in his dedication to 'troubling the stubborn world for meaning'.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from `Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. `The words are only the words,' he writes, `which is more or less everything.' Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a `genial smuggler of surprises': `his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' (TLS)