With first line: Love-stained day
Minor amendments throughout.
'The writer Phillip Hoare, celebrated author of The Whale and self-confessed sea obsessive, once wrote: ‘Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.’ This quote might also describe acclaimed poet and critic Felicity Plunkett’s latest book of poetry, A Kinder Sea, which takes writing about the sea – or through the sea – to whole new depths. This collection of 29 poems, published by University of Queensland Press (2020), reveals more than just a fascination with the literal sea. As any seasoned ocean swimmer or sailor knows, a calm surface is no indication of the sea’s nature, or of one’s journey across it.' (Introduction)
'Growing up on the coast, I felt like the sea and I were easy and old friends. The water framed my first two decades of life; smeared in sun cream and rash vests, my parents would take me to the beach on weekends where I would happily sluice myself in salted air and water. I realised later that I only ever knew the edge of the ocean where its fingers and toes gently touched mine. The one time I was caught in a mild rip, I was panicked-filled with the crystal understanding this was a stronger and fiercer swell than I had known. I knew the water’s strength in much the same way I know the universe is big: as a concept relative to my own smallness. Felicity Plunkett in her new collection, A Kinder Sea, seems to have no such reservations or fear. Her work reads as though she is immersed in the same deep place where the bedrock heart of the sea collects people’s daydreams and elegies. She speaks with penetrating insight and at times, a heartbreaking clarity.' (Introduction)
'Felicity Plunkett’s latest collection, A Kinder Sea, renders navigable the ocean of urgent emotions on which a poet floats her many loves and only life. Here, the sea is fluid in its identity – pun intended – as it is at once a sanctuary and a taker of lives, preserving and whittling-away at relics of existence. Sometimes elegiac in nature, these poems are warmly intimate. Yet, in Plunkett’s deft hands, the verse does not succumb to solipsism: she evokes a sense of universal experience as she occasionally samples lines from other writers, including Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Paul Celan, and Ali Smith. The effect is at once fresh and emulatory. The borrowed lines are given new life with Plunkett’s pen – or, to use the words of her poem, “Sound Bridge” (1-2), these are the “same notes in new throats” (2). Plunkett’s poetry offers up prayers, wishes, and promises for the future even as it preserves the past in a way that is less nostalgic or forensic than it is physiological.' (Introduction)
'Felicity Plunkett has being doing good works in the poetry sphere for some time now. She has edited for UQP a recent series of new and established poets; she reviews a wide variety of poetry in newspapers and magazines, as well as writing evocatively, in this journal, about influential figures in popular Australian poetics like Nick Cave and Gurrumul Yunupingu. Valuably, she has also made practical contributions to poetry teaching in the secondary English curriculum. Now she has published a second volume of her own poetry, a varied collection of highly accomplished poems.' (Introduction)
'A week ago, this review had a different beginning. The first sentence was ‘Let’s begin with bridges’. And we’ll get to the bridges. But as I’m writing, at the end of a long day with my kids at home, I hear Leigh Sales giving kindness a plug on the 7:30 Report. I’ve already muted a Facebook Group called The Kindness Pandemic. A lot of the stories being told on The Kindness Pandemic were hopeful and heart-warming. But small acts of kindness just aren’t doing it for me.' (Introduction)
'Felicity Plunkett’s latest collection, A Kinder Sea, renders navigable the ocean of urgent emotions on which a poet floats her many loves and only life. Here, the sea is fluid in its identity – pun intended – as it is at once a sanctuary and a taker of lives, preserving and whittling-away at relics of existence. Sometimes elegiac in nature, these poems are warmly intimate. Yet, in Plunkett’s deft hands, the verse does not succumb to solipsism: she evokes a sense of universal experience as she occasionally samples lines from other writers, including Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Paul Celan, and Ali Smith. The effect is at once fresh and emulatory. The borrowed lines are given new life with Plunkett’s pen – or, to use the words of her poem, “Sound Bridge” (1-2), these are the “same notes in new throats” (2). Plunkett’s poetry offers up prayers, wishes, and promises for the future even as it preserves the past in a way that is less nostalgic or forensic than it is physiological.' (Introduction)
'The writer Phillip Hoare, celebrated author of The Whale and self-confessed sea obsessive, once wrote: ‘Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.’ This quote might also describe acclaimed poet and critic Felicity Plunkett’s latest book of poetry, A Kinder Sea, which takes writing about the sea – or through the sea – to whole new depths. This collection of 29 poems, published by University of Queensland Press (2020), reveals more than just a fascination with the literal sea. As any seasoned ocean swimmer or sailor knows, a calm surface is no indication of the sea’s nature, or of one’s journey across it.' (Introduction)
