The White Room Poems
ISBN 9761877010224
Walleah Press, 2015
Cover design, Merridy Pugh
Cover image, Giles Hugo
Availability:
Publisher: Walleah Press
Also available through the author
or via Hobart Bookshop, Fullers Bookshop Hobart, and Black Swan Bookshop, New Norfolk. Sometimes available on Amazon
The White Room Poems was shortlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize in 2017.
A “livre compose” expressing the poet’s grief following the death of one of her sons in Switzerland, the book is arranged in six sections, which travel through memories, dreams, fears and premonitions of disaster. It confronts the difficult experiences surrounding the death of someone loved, the reactions of others, and ends with a still coda set in various Tasmanian settings.
The poet uses landscapes and weather, clouds, images and sounds of birds, bells, to ‘objectify’ the emotions of grief, achieving a sense of lightness that belies the density of emotion at the core of the spare, compressed poems.
"The halting, musical, brief lines demand to be read slowly, and release their meaning gradually. This is a text to be read and re-read, for its patient anguished exploration of grief, the interaction of its literary contexts (Coetzee, Basho, Celan, The Cloud of Unknowing), and significant contrasting locations in South Africa, Europe and Tasmania”
– Chris Ringrose
Australian Poetry Journal, v.6 n.2, 2016. Read his review here.