'Range Light' | poetry | ISBN 978 1 763653 047 | 76 pgs | Jul 2025 | $20 (within Australia)
Range Light is Louise Oxley’s third collection of poems. Her first, Compound Eye, was commended in the Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry, and her second, Buoyancy, was shortlisted in the WA Premier’s Literary Awards. Louise has won major national awards, among them the Bruce Dawe (twice), Melbourne Poets Union and Tom Collins prizes. Her poems have been anthologised in several Best Australian volumes, Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher and Wattmann) and Contemporary Australian Poetry in Chinese Translation (John Kinsella and Ouyang Yu, eds.). A selection of her work, Sitting with Cézanne, is Picaro Press’s Wagtail 41. Louise lives and works in Lutruwita/Tasmania.
Louise Oxley’s Range Light is a work of quiet accumulation. Attuned to the world and her place in it, Oxley writes with a deft line and precise
gravity. In poems that take in the details—where to gather dulse, the ‘empty, delicate angles’ of discovered bones, the moment when ‘autumn
sun has steadied at the hilltop’—Range Light inducts the reader into a world thick with life and feeling and inquiry. Oxley reveals wonder
at the ‘true, clear/ account of Nature’s phenomena’ and invites the reader to experience the same wonder.
Kate Middleton
Poetry Editor, Island