'The opening poem in this collection, ‘Ash Wednesday Windows’, provides an introduction to the kind of poetic journey we are about to embark on. After a fire, perhaps bushfire, the windows, almost personified, “lay on their backs beside the dirt driveway/ waiting for walls.” The onlooker sees soil, weeds, singed grass, “the only views he’d ever see through them”, and the poet leaves him “patrolling the melted windows,/ checking the shifts in perspective, the small distortions.” Gillett’s spare but loaded descriptions leave it to the reader to imagine the conflagration , the sense of loss and waste.' (Introduction)
'The opening poem in this collection, ‘Ash Wednesday Windows’, provides an introduction to the kind of poetic journey we are about to embark on. After a fire, perhaps bushfire, the windows, almost personified, “lay on their backs beside the dirt driveway/ waiting for walls.” The onlooker sees soil, weeds, singed grass, “the only views he’d ever see through them”, and the poet leaves him “patrolling the melted windows,/ checking the shifts in perspective, the small distortions.” Gillett’s spare but loaded descriptions leave it to the reader to imagine the conflagration , the sense of loss and waste.' (Introduction)
