'Malta—‘a slight blemish on the sea’s glaze’—forms the beating heart of Stone Mother Tongue, poems fired into existence by Annamaria Weldon’s experience of clambering over temples and monuments built by her ancestors. Now part of her psyche, they are melded with a wider experience of Australia as an ancient land. For Weldon, life is ‘all context and erasure’. When she writes of the masons knowing ‘which prayers to chant while hammering’, her poems entwine the land with a human history many thousands of years in the making.
- Kevin Brophy
'Meditative, delicate and restrained, these poems are nonetheless full of vivid realities: the ‘undersong’ of womanhood, family, loss, carob trees, wild rosemary, figs, geckoes, mother’s milk – and psychotropic chickpeas. Delving into her Maltese heritage, Annamaria Weldon shows us how the migrant’s encounter with Australia provokes a reinterpretation of ‘home’, a grappling with place of origin.
- Tracy Ryan' (Publication summary)
'Annamaria Weldon’s luminous fourth collection returns the poet to the archipelago of her birth. Stone Mother Tongue begins in prehistoric Malta, where Weldon mourns the “goddesses we trample[ed]” across the centuries. The poet guides us through shifting incarnations of her homeland, where “Recollection is mapped country folded backwards / along familiar creases” (50). Weldon’s poetry enacts a uniquely feminine divination; she calls forth a goddess oracle unbound from history, a statuary tongue unloosed from time. Ancient relics —museumed, looted, or abandoned—are portals to haunted islands where “pre-history seems just offshore . . . time’s lost coast in stone, not words.” Weldon elegantly negotiates the fraught territory between conflicted and conflicting histories: collective and personal, traumatic and resilient, human and divine.' (Introduction)
'I would also like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation and to pay my respect to their elders past and present.' (Introduction)
'Annamaria Weldon has produced an impressive collection with Stone Mother Tongue. Her imagery has some lovely naturalistic twists and turns with some breath-taking phrases. These are well crafted poems featuring lively, lithe lines, and gorgeous situations like in the ’16 Haiku for Lakelands Library Windows’, where Weldon mentions:'
Five black swans fly home
at nightfall, singing their way
through the starless sky'
(Introduction)
'Annamaria Weldon has produced an impressive collection with Stone Mother Tongue. Her imagery has some lovely naturalistic twists and turns with some breath-taking phrases. These are well crafted poems featuring lively, lithe lines, and gorgeous situations like in the ’16 Haiku for Lakelands Library Windows’, where Weldon mentions:'
Five black swans fly home
at nightfall, singing their way
through the starless sky'
(Introduction)
'I would also like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation and to pay my respect to their elders past and present.' (Introduction)
'Annamaria Weldon’s luminous fourth collection returns the poet to the archipelago of her birth. Stone Mother Tongue begins in prehistoric Malta, where Weldon mourns the “goddesses we trample[ed]” across the centuries. The poet guides us through shifting incarnations of her homeland, where “Recollection is mapped country folded backwards / along familiar creases” (50). Weldon’s poetry enacts a uniquely feminine divination; she calls forth a goddess oracle unbound from history, a statuary tongue unloosed from time. Ancient relics —museumed, looted, or abandoned—are portals to haunted islands where “pre-history seems just offshore . . . time’s lost coast in stone, not words.” Weldon elegantly negotiates the fraught territory between conflicted and conflicting histories: collective and personal, traumatic and resilient, human and divine.' (Introduction)
