Category: Readings

Mettle, metal, well-met, this poetry weaves threads of love, fight and family with an honesty that connects the soul to the panther’s upheld fist. The openness is a gift: ‘one of the starting points/between you and me/is here on this page’ (3).

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Mixed feelings when it comes to this book, but the love of footy reads true. I play the edges. Kick to kick is easy, marks up is a battle and British Bulldogs is beyond me. One real game and I was done.

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Words blurring you, me and us, inviting toothy listening (123). ’Praisesong for the menopausal planet’ in each line (125). ‘Mother walruses know their babies best by touching them with their whiskers. They don’t depend on their eyes. They trust intimate vibration.’ (97).

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A twist in the back, cut-throat sharp excisions, all the way to the ‘wilderness suicide’, the world in a room and ‘you’ are there, deep in the layers (206). This book cannot be scrubbed off, no matter how much coin you carry.

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The opening pages of this river of a book float you into a place you know/don’t know. A siren song that reads like a bedtime story until you realise you’re spooked out at a campfire with no light back to the house.

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A triangular love story with angles like arrows. Two women, deeply injured, a fully furnished home. History, family, justice. Occupation, incursion, intimacy. This by a writer who refused books when younger, ‘staring blankly at the first page … vividly daydreaming about flying.’

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Not easy reading, this efflorescence, different voices ranging out together, holding each other, becoming truth together, calling for justice, urging towards joy, surging towards transformation. A glorious grounding. Local, right across the world, held in this basket that ‘grows and evolves’ (1).

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When everyone is teaching, everyone is learning. Laughter a marker of change. Unpredictability, contingency, all the mystery of what happens to create a class. A windowless room, , the save found sitting in a circle. Food creating shared tables. Listening for every voice.

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Deep faith. Souls ‘drawn together the way they were in the life before life’ (116). The fight against the ‘proliferating, evolving whisper of instability’ , that ‘constant threat’ to women (218). The ‘sanctity’ in privacy (269). Love as an ‘unsubstantiated recognition’ (292).

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Forest of pain. ‘The hungry cat sees the girl, her wounds still warm. … gets close to try the flesh; a bomb pounds the street. No flesh, no girl, no father, no cat. Nobody is hungry. The moon overhead is not ….’

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