'This is an alive, refreshing and, quite literally, elemental book of water and skin, muscle and fire. Rachael Mead’s poems are immediate and grounded whilst entwined with fragility and struggle. They don’t shy from the difficulties and sadness as well as joy in human kinship. Along the way Mead offers us a clear-eyed self-consciousness of the human within the larger places of the earth, in this case places such as Antarctica, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, Ikara–Flinders Ranges. The book offers us an embodied sense of secular ritual in its attentiveness and its use of form – lists, lyric iterations, admonitions - as the poet both argues and confides with herself and us, about the wild pleasures of earth’s physical and emotional topographies, and of our responsibilities within all this. A powerful and invigorating book of journeys well worth taking.
'JILL JONES'
Dedication: For Andrew,
Des & Furious
who make coming home the best part of being away.
'Rachael Mead’s new poetry collection The Flaw in the Pattern continues her important work of watching and speaking through the focal point of the self in the world – in particular, the natural world of place and light and senses and the tracking of our human movement through it. This is the work of a highly skilled and perceptive poet taking charge of her craft: separately these poems offer a range of engaging and challenging windows onto human experience; together they provide a fast-flowing meditation not only on a life in process but the reflective and shaping business of poetry itself. Highly ommended in the Dorothy Hewitt Award for an unpublished manuscript, this collection is now part of UWAP’s ever-expanding poetry series.' (Introduction)
'Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance. They are a credit to Terri-ann White and her team at UWAP in Perth. The miserably small print runs for volumes of poetry often lead to scrimping and saving on design and production, but here at least design costs have been defrayed over the entire series and it pays off in the look of the finished product.' (Introduction)
'Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance. They are a credit to Terri-ann White and her team at UWAP in Perth. The miserably small print runs for volumes of poetry often lead to scrimping and saving on design and production, but here at least design costs have been defrayed over the entire series and it pays off in the look of the finished product.' (Introduction)
'Rachael Mead’s new poetry collection The Flaw in the Pattern continues her important work of watching and speaking through the focal point of the self in the world – in particular, the natural world of place and light and senses and the tracking of our human movement through it. This is the work of a highly skilled and perceptive poet taking charge of her craft: separately these poems offer a range of engaging and challenging windows onto human experience; together they provide a fast-flowing meditation not only on a life in process but the reflective and shaping business of poetry itself. Highly ommended in the Dorothy Hewitt Award for an unpublished manuscript, this collection is now part of UWAP’s ever-expanding poetry series.' (Introduction)
