Nicola Bowery: 'married to this ground'

Launched by Meredith McKinney, Braidwood NSW, June 2014.

In married to this ground, her third poetry collection, Nicola Bowery’s core interest is to evoke a geography of marriage. She writes from a wide plateau landscape but her focus is the texture and grain of daily life, inherent drama (and comedy) in relationship, the interplay of psychic and physical terrain. Bowery’s language in these poems seems the perfect vehicle for the task she sets herself: to find poetry in immediate experience and in the ‘ordinary’. Intimate and spacious, the poems offer a distinctive sense of having been long distilled in the ground they arise from. At the same time there’s a compelling cumulative power in the work, a vigour and accessibility that will draw the reader into Bowery’s world.