Samantha Sirimanne Hyde has penned a laudatory review of Vanessa Proctor’s Dec 2024 poetry collection On Wonder, at Grattan Street Press (29th September, 2025).
The Japanese perception of sadness, particularly a tender, contemplative sadness, is often defined by the term ‘mono no aware’. This is often rendered as the pathos or frailty of all things: an understanding of the impermanence of all matter and the wistful reaction that comes from its acceptance. Proctor’s poetry is often touched with this leitmotif of finding beauty in what’s blemished, fragile or ephemeral. For instance, cherry blossoms, which epitomise beauty, transience and renewal in Japanese culture, are depicted in the poem, “The Scattering of Blossom”, shifting between life and death, beauty, sorrow and acceptance. The poem moves from Australia, where the cherry trees bloom along Sakura Avenue “at the old POW camp in Cowra”, a resting place for over two hundred Japanese soldiers “beneath a foreign soil”, to Rikugien Gardens in Japan, where the poet reflects on the pale pink blossoms and the impending birth of her child, and finally to a snapshot of luminous flowering wild cherry trees in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Proctor encourages the reader to look more deeply at the world and at ourselves with kindness and compassion, celebrating our interconnectedness with one another and with nature. On Wonder is a book of understated elegance with comforting alchemy, a collection to be savoured time and time again.
Sri Lankan born Samantha Sirimanne Hyde lives in the unceded land of the Wallumedegal people in NSW. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Macquarie University. Her collection of 20 short stories is called The Villawood Express & other stories and over 300 of her haiku and tanka have appeared in poetry journals. Her debut novel, The Lyrebird’s Cry, is a tale of self-discovery of a gay man trapped into an arranged marriage.