"An impressive and engaging collection…the poems are assured yet
they also bring out the often conflicted feelings that places can evoke:
strangeness, beauty, loss, violence, distance, closeness, intimacy and
indifference" - Judith Beveridge
Powerful
debut collection by a young Western Australian poet.
Shevaun
Cooley was born and raised in the south west of Western Australia, but has been
drawn ceaselessly to the landscapes of North Wales, where she lived for a time
in her early twenties. The poems are written out of the questions this divided
orientation raises – about what constitutes a home, and how we might find our
way there. Animals have an ability to home that seems both biological and
intuitive. Do we have this compass too? In the poems it is the sudden
appearance of wild creatures, the shifting waters of sea or lake or river, the
way light falls over the scene, which points to what we are driven to hold, but
which ultimately evades us. Other material, from the poet’s own life -
including, inevitably, heartbreak - makes its way into the poems as well, since
many of these emotions arise from a sense of being unhomed or unsettled. There
is also a fine intelligence at work, calling in mythical resonances, the
testimony of poets and scientists, and the resources of language, to sharpen
the poet’s alertness to her surroundings.
