(From Robert Dessaix’s speech to launch THE DEAR FOUR, poetry by Mary Blackwood, Christiane Con\u00e9sa-Bostock, Karen Knight and Liz McQuilkin \u2013 Hobart 14th December 2025)<\/p>\n
I feel (in this year of Donald Trump, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza) as if something has withered inside me. Something that\u2019s always been there, isn\u2019t there any more. There\u2019s an emptiness. (And not the Buddhist sort.) I feel a sort of grief. Who doesn\u2019t. 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\u2019t let me lose my mind<\/em>, pleads a night-time voice in Liz McQuilkin\u2019s first poem in the collection \u2026 but she, with her squirrel psyche, has a store of poems to nourish her spirit.<\/p>\n This collection, The Dear Four <\/em>(an eccentric title, too, arresting \u2013 Who\u2019d have guessed what \u2018dear\u2019 means without being told?) The Dear Four<\/em> gives me confidence, nevertheless, even without a store of poems, if I pay attention, I can find what\u2019s been missing. I am enlivened by it \u2013 inspirited, we once said. (If only things were as they used to be \u2026<\/em>) Not every poem in the book will mend the wound \u2013 my particular wounds \u2026 how could it? But a surprising number make me feel whole. To my surprise. To my delight. (I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n