'The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. after four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But between, the port hopes: 'there could be accidents of kindness here.' In her latest collection of poetry, award-winning author Merlina Bobis traces the accidents of art and life. Drawing on the journal of Pigafetta whose writings have become an accident of history, Merlinda Bobis composes with an attuned ear and her poems are rich with imagery; with breath and heart.' (Publication summary)
'Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends. This choice of adjective risks sounding rapturous or breathless, but it speaks to the visionary and startling qualities of the work of this Filipino-Australian author, as well as her work’s range. An award-winning transnational, cross-disciplinary writer and scholar, Bobis is the author of prose fiction and poetry, academic discourse, and dramatic works for radio and stage. She writes in Bikol, Filipino and English, demonstrating what the critic Dolores Herrero has described as a ‘defiant willingness’ to engage with her ‘rich bicultural heritage’.'(Introduction)
'Marianne Moore called it ‘courageous attack’:
today, you span the far mountains
with an arm and say,
‘this I offer you —
all this blue sweat
of eucalypt.’
'So begins ‘driving to katoomba’, from the first poetry collection that Merlinda Bobis published in Australia, Summer was a fast train without terminals (Spinifex, 1998). The opening is typical of Bobis’s inimitable gusto and extravagance: the lines follow the gesture of the body that reaches for a view, simultaneously craving and offering the world while delighting in the knowledge that both impulses remain unfulfilled.' (Introduction)
'Marianne Moore called it ‘courageous attack’:
today, you span the far mountains
with an arm and say,
‘this I offer you —
all this blue sweat
of eucalypt.’
'So begins ‘driving to katoomba’, from the first poetry collection that Merlinda Bobis published in Australia, Summer was a fast train without terminals (Spinifex, 1998). The opening is typical of Bobis’s inimitable gusto and extravagance: the lines follow the gesture of the body that reaches for a view, simultaneously craving and offering the world while delighting in the knowledge that both impulses remain unfulfilled.' (Introduction)
'Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends. This choice of adjective risks sounding rapturous or breathless, but it speaks to the visionary and startling qualities of the work of this Filipino-Australian author, as well as her work’s range. An award-winning transnational, cross-disciplinary writer and scholar, Bobis is the author of prose fiction and poetry, academic discourse, and dramatic works for radio and stage. She writes in Bikol, Filipino and English, demonstrating what the critic Dolores Herrero has described as a ‘defiant willingness’ to engage with her ‘rich bicultural heritage’.'(Introduction)
