Since 1990, with Penguin’s publication of Raft, Barry Hill has been acclaimed for his poetry. His Ghosting William Buckley (Heinemann 1993), which won his first Premier’s Award, was described by Overland’s Barrett Reid as a ‘major work’. David Malouf wrote that The Inland Sea (Penguin 2001) was ‘a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism’. Necessity: Poems 1996-2006 won the ACT Judith Wright Award. Lines for Birds (2011), a collaboration with the artist John Wolseley, was commended for the Prime Minister’s Prize, and described by Nathaniel Tarn as ‘a miraculous gift of a book’. His Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud (2012), which John Kinsella described as ‘a masterpiece’, was short-listed for the 2013 UK Forward Prize, and prompted Sebastian Smee to declare him ‘a superb poet’ … His Selected Poems was published last year. Kind Fire is his eleventh collection.