This week in our poetry news round up we look at the death of the singer and songwriter Dolly Parton, and the closing of Australia’s Poetry Month.
Dolly Parton Passes Away Aged 80
Dolly Parton, the singer, songwriter and philanthropist whose songs became part of the furniture of the last six decades, has died at the age of 80. Her death was announced by her nephew Bryan Seaver in a video posted to social media, and confirmed in a statement from her representatives, which said she had died peacefully in Nashville on Tuesday 25 August. Her publicist later said the cause was a brief battle with cancer.
Born on 19 January 1946 in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, Parton was the fourth of twelve children. Whatever else she became – film star, businesswoman, theme park owner – she thought of herself first as a writer. Songs such as Jolene, Coat of Many Colors, 9 to 5 and I Will Always Love You have sold more than 100 million records between them and have been recorded, borrowed and rewritten by artists in almost every genre going.
It is worth saying plainly that a great deal of what Parton did was poetry by another name. Coat of Many Colors in particular sits squarely in the narrative ballad tradition that runs back through Robert Burns and the old broadsides: a small, exact story about poverty and a mother’s hands, told in plain words, with the moral left for the listener to find. She had an ear for the single concrete detail that does the work of a whole stanza, and a way of getting out of a song before it started explaining itself.
Her reach into reading was more direct still. The Dolly Parton Imagination Library, founded in honour of her father, gifts books each month to children from birth to the age of five, and now operates across five countries. Millions of free books go out through it every month, and for a great many children it is the first book in the house.
Parton’s husband of nearly six decades, Carl Dean, died in March 2025, and she spoke openly afterwards about how much the loss had taken out of her. She released the song If You Hadn’t Been There in his honour.
Tributes have come thick and fast from the poetry world as well as the music one. Write Out Loud reshared Di Slaney’s poem ‘Dolly Parton’s wig’, which won their 20th anniversary Echoes competition, judged by Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The poem was written in memory of the poet Kathryn Bevis, who died from cancer two months after publishing her first collection, The Butterfly House, with Seren, and who told Slaney she felt the spirit of Dolly while wearing the wig she wore after losing her hair.
Australia’s Poetry Month Closes with National Gala
August is Poetry Month in Australia, run for the sixth year by the Sydney-based organisation Red Room Poetry, and it closed this week with the National Poetry Month Gala at the State Library of New South Wales on Thursday 27 August.
The gala was hosted by the broadcaster and journalist Jan Fran and brought together contemporary Australian poets, spoken word artists and special guests reading their favourite verse, with a musical performance, a pop-up bookshop and signings afterwards. It was live-streamed free on Red Room Poetry’s YouTube channel and Auslan interpreted. Earlier the same day, the poet and editor Evelyn Araluen – whose debut Dropbear won the 2022 Stella Prize and whose second collection The Rot took the 2026 Victorian Prize for Literature – led a workshop as a warm-up to the evening.
This year’s programme drew in international guests including Jericho Brown from the United States, Tusiata Avia from Aotearoa New Zealand, Michael Pedersen from Scotland and Pádraig Ó Tuama from Ireland. It also featured a Phone-a-Poem line installed across eight locations, a #30in30 writing competition, poets in residence at Varuna, the National Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains, and billboard installations.
All of it lands in a significant year. Australia will announce its inaugural National Poet Laureate in October, a role established under the federal government’s Revive cultural policy. The appointment runs for three years and carries an honorarium of $80,000 a year plus travel support, with the National Library of Australia providing workspace and archival access. Not everyone in Australian poetry has welcomed the idea, and the arguments about what a laureate is actually for have been running for a while now. October should settle at least some of them.
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