Learning Country: Song Cycles from the Heartland is Sarah Tiffen’s first collection of poetry. A lifetime of writing poetry has evolved to produce work of sometimes epic proportion, which explores a genuine Australian identity, imbued with history, spirituality and a sense of time and place, and evoking and celebrating the fabric of rural life. The ‘songs’ create a beautiful, evocative narrative of this life and these times, which is also timeless. And the reader is acutely aware of the omnipresence of the landscape itself, and nature, as the defining physical and spiritual entity in shaping identity. Centred on the life and landscape of farming communities in western NSW, in particular the author’s home town of Leeton in the Riverina and its surrounding districts, these are celebratory stories of ordinary people and the spirituality that is inherent in the everyday, the things that may be lost if we don’t try to record them imaginatively – the myths of an immigrant culture excavated, resurrected, critiqued. Learning Country may remind readers that poetry can be a map into ourselves, and that the journey is as important as the destination.