Drawing together work from across Peter Skrzynecki’s career alongside new poems, Old/New World traces the emotional geography of migration.

The poems cover the country left behind, the country entered, and the divided inheritance carried between them, amidst, there is Polish family history, postwar displacement, suburban Australia, work, faith and the estrangements between parents and children. 

Skrzynecki writes in a direct, image-led style, attentive to ordinary objects and domestic gestures as vessels of historical experience. The collection’s importance within Australian poetry lies partly in how it made migrant life central rather than supplementary to the national story. Its language can appear traditional beside more formally experimental contemporaries, but the restraint is deliberate: these poems work through accumulation, clarity and the moral weight of witness. For readers interested in migration, family memory, Polish-Australian history and poetry grounded in lived experience.

University of Queensland Press, 2007; 2016 reprint. Paperback. Light cover creasing and minor shelf wear.