Arboricole
Magpies
Masachi at the River Kwai
Peonies
Two More Birds
Mark O'Flynn — Louise Oxley's Compound Eye,
Five Islands Press, 2003
Carolyn Fisher — Louise Oxley's Buoyancy,
Five Islands Press, 2008
Louise Oxley —
Hecate's' / Australian Women's Book Review,
Volume 10, 1998
Louise Oxley – Berenice Eastman's
Nan Chauncy – A Writer's Life, The Friends of Chauncy Vale Inc, 2000
Louise Oxley — Jan Owen's Timedancing,
Five Islands Press, 2002
Louise Oxley — Philomena van Rijswijk's The Time It Rained Fish,
Esperance Press, 1999
Louise Oxley — Andrew Sant's Album of Domestic Exiles,
Black Pepper, 1997
Pete Hay, Kristen Lang, Louise Oxley
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 TranslationM (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
There is a moment in Range Light in which the skeletal remnants of an animal are perceived as ‘loss in scrambled code’.
This is beautifully suggestive of Louise Oxley’s achievement – whether focussing on loss, hope, mortality, love, or the
ambiguous presence of the natural world, her poems are always seeking to unscramble the codes in which the mysteries of
experience come to us.
Ross Gillet
Range Light is the powerful reward of waiting sixteen years to publish. There is a deep maturity in Louise Oxley’s
detailed and original observations of history, nature, art and land. With a richness of language, each word is placed in the
line to expand, encompass and challenge. The way time tangles and untangles – forward and backward, in circularity, or on
directed pathways – underlies much in the book. Acutely aware, like Citizen Riche in 1792, Oxley is ‘seeing always, what
is different from the known’, making connections with the nature of our own inner world as well as our politics in the
broadest sense, a tender subtlety in the handling of her subject matter. With the guidance of these poetic ‘range lights’
we move into an open understanding.
Robyn Rowland