Month: December 2025

(From Robert Dessaix’s speech to launch THE DEAR FOUR, poetry by Mary Blackwood, Christiane Conésa-Bostock, Karen Knight and Liz McQuilkin – Hobart 14th December 2025)

I feel (in this year of Donald Trump, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza) as if something has withered inside me. Something that’s always been there, isn’t there any more. There’s an emptiness. (And not the Buddhist sort.) I feel a sort of grief. Who doesn’t. Something vital I once had a grasp of has disappeared. Am I mildly demented? Have I misplaced something? What is it? (At my age, after all, you misplace things all the time: books, letters, your spectacles, people …) Please don’t let me lose my mind, pleads a night-time voice in Liz McQuilkin’s first poem in the collection … but she, with her squirrel psyche, has a store of poems to nourish her spirit.

This collection, The Dear Four (an eccentric title, too, arresting – Who’d have guessed what ‘dear’ means without being told?) The Dear Four gives me confidence, nevertheless, even without a store of poems, if I pay attention, I can find what’s been missing. I am enlivened by it – inspirited, we once said. (If only things were as they used to be …) Not every poem in the book will mend the wound – my particular wounds … how could it? But a surprising number make me feel whole. To my surprise. To my delight. (I don’t normally listen to what poets say, remember. The distillation I find in poetry is usually too radical for me.) Yet overwhelmingly these poems made me sing. One by one they made me take flight.

(More at https://walleahpress.com.au/launch-the-dear-four.html)