Lucy Williams: 'Internal Weather'
$20.00 — free postage within Australia

‘internal weather’ by Lucy Williams, launched by Kevin Brophy on 3rd May, 2014.


Lucy Williams reminds us that we’re not the only ones on the back step looking to the stars for clues. She writes of hearts and arrows, spills and saves, speaking so clearly you think the stars might answer. She knows the dinner table is best cleaned with long, wide strokes, and that the arc of each stroke can be epic—the remains of the past, what we keep and discard, what we imagine beyond routine’s course. But metaphor and image are merely bunting if they haven’t been challenged by crisis, and Williams is among those true poets who declare the difficult worth of their craft. It’s a welcome voice that returns to us, her first collection in fourteen years, one that calls mortality ‘that bastard bully’, knowing that ‘truth will never soften in the telling’. These are poems to read while on the back step under past and present light, cherishing stars and the silence filled by a call from someone you love.

               Nathan Curnow

A collection of poetry dealing with those four fundamental things: birth, childhood, love and death. They find their poetic home in this book in which, ‘she throws open every door to our hearts and walks in.’ We’ve waited a long time for this collection, so when Lucy Williams writes, ‘it’s about time I told you/I think we got it right somehow’ we certainly believe her, for there is about these poems an emotional honesty and a lyric strength that is deeply moving.

               Ron Pretty