The Other Way Out

The Other Way Out opens with the white heat of the tropical north – with a sky so pressing it falls like glass to the ground – and closes with the carved hand of an ancient statue, proffering love and gladness and affirming life.

At the heart of the book, a series of monologues attempts to draw language from stone: from a Mt Warning cairn, to the sculptures of Coustou and Rodin, to monuments in Sri Lanka, China, Hollywood and beyond. Grounded in the immediacy of the physical world, these poems are at turns humorous, heated and redemptive, yet always keenly alive.

The pace is characteristically calm, the emotion complex, the eye attentive for just the image that will illumine her reasoning without overstatement, that will catch the humour, create the tact, the fine connections of a very singular sensibility. Alan Gould