Just as the loop of the somersault can be exultant or disturbing, joyous or disorienting, this collection – ‘The Natural World Somersaults’ – includes the spectrum of a life’s experiences. It starts with the particular, charting a story of growing up queer in a small Victorian town, to discovering solace and strength in the natural bush environment and in love, affinity and friendship. This is situated among many lives, continually considering connection and alienation. Though the poems witness self-hatred, rejection, homophobia, disability and illness, they are oriented towards beauty, acceptance and resilience. These poems bring a horticulturalist’s eye to the details of landscape, avoiding the anthropocentric in favour of a close and respectful observation of the more-than-human. Shifting perspectives keep open the possibilities of hope, placing this amid creative and destructive forces. There are poems exploring a time when the impact of illness reduced memory and words. These poems question how poetry continues when language is curtailed. Like the forest or the river, everything reveals itself in portions, and the forms and voices of the poems in this prismic collection are filled with reflection, wonder, curiosity and hope.

JILL JONES:
‘The Natural World Somersaults’ is a book of hard-won, resonant and powerful writing. Shaine Melrose’s language turns intently from light to dark in these unflinching, visceral, and urgent poems that are palpable with both grief and fortitude. Metamorphosis drives this book, as the body, of necessity, searches for and aligns itself with something further than the human: ‘I studied nature with my feet in moss’. Unflinching, honest, and often heartbreaking, this poetic narrative
of damaged bodies twists and unfolds through its tenacious journey of uncovering identity and finally discovering some degree of physical and spiritual shelter. ‘I am a history of jagged fragments. / From silence I speak’ Melrose writes. And this book speaks truly through intertwined forms and fragments of belonging and not belonging: to the body, sexuality, family, culture and the larger non-human world.

RACHAEL MEAD:
Potent and profound, this is a collection of distilled attentiveness that speaks of the power of the natural world to guide and sustain us, even through the darkest of times. Intimately attuned to the Australian landscape, ‘The Natural World Somersaults’ is a lyrical personal history of an outsider’s struggle to find strength, self and community in the face of society’s descent towards homogeneity.

This collection is a call to compassion, its poems full of fire and pathos, unsettling the familiar and asking us to pay close attention to the world these lines lay bare. Melrose digs beneath the surface of life, allowing the richness unearthed to nourish her singular view of the world.