Cirrus@Austlit

'Theodore Ell’s book has all the features that one hopes to find in a first book of poems: a distinctive manner, a distinctive tone of voice and a distinctive view not only of things in the world but of what a poem might make of these things. There is also an avoidance of the conventional styles and solutions that one is likely to find in contemporary Australian poems although the book’s title, which works at a number of possible puns, does use a technique common among poets. “Beginning in Sight” can be read as “Beginning Insight”, but its more apparent meaning is that we should expect the sense of sight to be the dominant one in the poems that follow – it will be where they begin. And this is certainly established in the book’s first poem, “Mooring” – whose title also suggests that it will deal with the way that the poems are anchored – which begins with two stanzas of very precise visual registration:..' (Introduction)