KAY CAIRNS | Between Two Skies


'Between Two Skies' | ISBN 978 0 645797 787 | 54 pgs | August 2024





Between Two Skies is a pilgrimage to home, family, memory, nature: a mindful journey between Cairns’ adopted home, Western Australia, and her cultural home, Ireland.

Her poetry speaks in colour and sound: white, middle grey, clouded skies. A poignant, insightful view of life, past and present. Delve into a ‘fathomless infinity of space’, breaths so intimate, so gentle that light ‘the earth for days’. A beautiful, meditative, read.
Rose van Son, Poet and Writer

There is immense care and craft shown within these poems. The use of diction and imagery is stunning, such as in “Heart Beat” – “Here peat, still pliant, cradles flesh/ that waits/ for the high-hawk cry of the uilleann pipe”. And the interplay between Irish and Australian settings is deftly handled. A collection to savour.
Kevin Gillam





Now living in Perth WA, Kay Cairns is an Irish born poet who grew up in 1970s Belfast during ‘the Troubles’. During that time she studied English, French and Russian literature at Queen’s University of Belfast, where she was fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend readings by poets Seamus Heaney and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Kay emigrated to Australia in 1983 and began writing ‘for real’ during her long service leave from teaching in 2001. She began by writing fiction, but in 2003 began to write poetry. Her first poem, 'Exit Wounds', written after attending a Juice writing retreat workshop run by the late Andrew Burke, went on to win the Tom Collins Poetry Prize in 2004. In 2024 Kay received a commendation in the same competition with her poem 'Looking for the River', and her poem Wacol Migrant Centre was highly commended in the Spilt Ink Poetry competition 2018.

Kay’s poetry has been published in Quadrant and in Australian poetry journals and anthologies such as Famous Reporter, Poetica Christi, Indigo, The Weighing of the Heart, Poetry D’Amour, Tempus, Locus, Cuttlefish and most recently Brushstrokes and the Liquid Amber Poetry of Home anthology. She also presents creative writing and poetry workshops at Peter Cowan Writing Centre and has been guest poet and regular open mic reader at WOW (Walking on Water, 2005), Supper Club and Voicebox. In her poetry Kay draws on strong emotional relationships with people and places, aspects of the natural world often triggering connections with life experiences. Her poems also explore political or cultural themes and her relationship with Australia and with her country of birth.