'Stone Scar Air Water' | poetry | ISBN 978 1 877010 323 | 142 pgs | Jun 2013 | $20.00 within Australia
As with her previous books, the work in Stone, Scar, Air, Water. . . exposes a wide
variety of sources to the processes of the poem. There is a new emphasis on lyrics
which deal directly with her own experience, but there are also poems which
display an ongoing fascination with female characters who are both courageous
and vulnerable. Compared to her earlier work, there is also a new sombreness.
Two key sequences – “Michelangelo’s Daughter”, which deals with child abuse,
and “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”, a meditation on the coming of the Europeans, and
on the damage of applied perspectives – deal with situations which are broken,
and unresolved. Many of the poems about Ireland broaden that doubt about
our capacity to effect benevolent change into the whole world of ancestries and
endings. Assured in its use of images, deft in its management of ideas and always
curious, this volume registers a resonant change of direction for a probing and
accomplished poet.
Martin Langford