Cirrus@Austlit

'Helen Avery’s Loosely Defined is a warm, lush, rich harvest of poetry despite its predominant setting of the dry outback. Dry the earth may be, out west, but it is far from arid. The landscape is teeming with insects, bird life, and people — all of which are recurring characters in a collection of verse characterised by what Jeffrey Harpeng maintains is “a subdued empathy for person and place.” Indeed, this is an organic poetry, working itself up out of the soil tilled and tended by loving human hands gnarled from labour.' (Introduction)