The Girl Green as Elderflower: Text Classics
Text Classics
Randolph Stow
Introduction by Kerryn Goldsworthy
He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face…
Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present.
Read a feature in the Australian on Stow’s legacy by Nicolas Rothwell.
andThe Girl Green as Elderflower
‘As eccentric as it is magnificently achieved.’
‘His novels and poetry embody a uniquely rich and strange account of the land and people of Australia that we can ill afford to lose.’
‘It is a rare pleasure for those of us who are already fans to have these works at our disposal…[Stow was] the most talented and celebrated Australian author of the post-White generation.’
‘It should be taken as no commentary on contemporary Oz Lit that I choose Text’s fistful of Randolph Stow reissues for my local favourite(s) during 2015. Their appearance reminds us that a gentle, wise, wounded, and immensely talented poet in prose once lived among us.‘
