PETE HAY: "... Well, look outside. This is not a spare, dessicated, cut-down land. It's dramatic, it's topographically complex, it's green, it's wet, it's springing with intricate life and if you go to the northern tropics it's the same. If we must take our Australian writing touchstones from the Australian landscape - and of course we should - we need a much more nuanced and variegated sense of what that means. Even the dry, dessicated deserts of the interior are, I suspect, somewhat more robust and more emotionally extravagent and more vital than my poetic informant gave credit for. So: more blood in our poetry please, more spring in its step, more - consequence be damned - passion. And here it is. Dael Allison writes as I would want Australian poets to write - not exactly like Dael Allison because I want Dael Allison's voice to remain gloriously unique, but you know what I mean here.... "

Pete Hay: Tasmanian Poetry Festival, October 2012