'Jennifer Harrison’s Anywhy is exceptional. The depth and lightly carried learning of the author, as we embrace each poem, is startling. We are philosophically shaken. Her title Anywhy may suggest the cool shrug of ‘whatever’ but Harrison’s neologism is a steady-eyed consideration of the world: its ecology, its history, its fragilities and resilience. Her insight is subtle but never vague, inviting our imagination to consider the inner life of birds, the emotive pull of hardware, Emma Hamilton, a reverie at Blackwood Village (from which the title emerges), DNA or Absolute Zero. Above all, it scintillates with human sorrow and human response.' (Publication Summary)
'Sarah Day's debut collection, A Hunger to Be Less Serious (1987), married lightness of touch with depth of insight. In Towards Light & Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp, 9781925780024), Day continues this project in poems concerned with light, a thing presented as both transformative and transformable. In ‘Reservoir’, for instance, the glass of a porthole can bend light with ‘its oblique know-how’.' (Introduction)
'Jennifer Harrison’s excellent new book continues the evolution of her complex and challenging vision, challenging because an unusual set of perspectives is brought to bear on conventional subjects such as personal illness, grief and the planet’s prospects for the future. And it isn’t just a matter of her scientific background: throughout the earlier books there were poems documenting and exploring a continuing fascination with something as abstruse as commedia dell’arte. Here there are batches of poems exploring aspects of photography and a set of animal poems which read almost as a catalogue of the different ways in which a subject can appear in a poem.' (Introduction)
'Jennifer Harrison’s excellent new book continues the evolution of her complex and challenging vision, challenging because an unusual set of perspectives is brought to bear on conventional subjects such as personal illness, grief and the planet’s prospects for the future. And it isn’t just a matter of her scientific background: throughout the earlier books there were poems documenting and exploring a continuing fascination with something as abstruse as commedia dell’arte. Here there are batches of poems exploring aspects of photography and a set of animal poems which read almost as a catalogue of the different ways in which a subject can appear in a poem.' (Introduction)
'Sarah Day's debut collection, A Hunger to Be Less Serious (1987), married lightness of touch with depth of insight. In Towards Light & Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp, 9781925780024), Day continues this project in poems concerned with light, a thing presented as both transformative and transformable. In ‘Reservoir’, for instance, the glass of a porthole can bend light with ‘its oblique know-how’.' (Introduction)
