Cirrus@Austlit

'“… an involving exploration of affection, solitude, travel and the tender intricacies of human connection … nuanced poems in which the fractures of experience are exquisitely sutured by words.”

– Paul Hetherington, Professor Emeritus, University of Canberra' (Publication summary)

'Ghosts Struggle to Swim revisits and reimagines distant and recent pasts and their people. It explores how memories are made and kept, daily rituals, art and water in all its forms.

'“Jane Frank’s poems take us into moments which are at once familiar and strange: tapestries and installations of her family and her world. At turns wise and wistful, these poems are snapshots of art, philosophy, landscape and memory. A beautiful and overdue first collection of poetry.”

'Damen O’Brien'(Publication summary)

'Critical State is a collection of poetry about Queensland, articulating concerns about habitat loss and the extinction of local species. The anthology addresses history, loss, discovery and the ever diminishing diversity of our environment with intensity, metaphor, clear-eyed detail and rhythmic language.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'For the best part of a decade, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, my family and I were included in the informal list of house guests at Abydos, Dr Val Vallis's rainforest retreat at The Knoll, North Tamborine. Dr Vallis (1916-2009), who preferred to be known as Val, a distinguished poet and Reader in English in what was then the University of Queensland's English Department, had been a friend and mentor to me during my undergraduate years. Val's offer to lend me the key to Abydos was a gift that opened the way to a place of profound natural beauty, inspiration and creativity, and the poems in this Tamborine Mountain collection, Green Dance, are the direct result of that magnanimous gesture.' (Foreword introduction)