'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)