Cirrus@Austlit

'The Silences, a two hander from Amanda Anastasi and Robbie Coburn, is one of the hits of the year for me. Although slender, coming in at just 41 pages, the poems have a power and coherence that has resulted from keeping their remit tightly focussed. Instead of a dos-si-dos format where each of the poets have a designated space within the book and their own ‘front’ cover, the poems in The Silences are interleaved as a conversation between the poets. The order, sometimes a single poem from one author followed by a set of poems from the other, is a well-structured scheme that has obviously been dictated by the flow of the poems rather than an artificially introduced this-then-that/ you-then-me idea.'  (Introduction)