Cirrus@Austlit

'This is a complex, intriguing and quite exciting first book. The central two (of its four sections) are a kind of poetic search, not for the various certainties or states that poets yearn for, but for a single poet, Denise Levertov. As a long time admirer of Levertov – surely the most likable (and one of the most rewarding) of the post-war school of American “New Poets” – I’m immediately well-disposed and it’s a disposition carried through the other poems of Moon Wrasse. Of course, it raises the question of what one wants from “pursuing” another poet. A poet wants poems, perhaps, as an intellectual wants a better and fuller understanding. But another poet always remains, ultimately, out of reach: the quest valuable but the grail unobtainable. You can feel this in poems like “On Finding and Not Finding Levertov” and “Cedar Tree” in which Drummond visits Valentines Park in Ilford, a place looming large in Levertov’s childhood. In the first of these the issue is one of maturity: the difficulty is to try to see the world through the eyes of a child, even if the child is a nascent poet experiencing the “double vision” of places both in their ordinariness and in the more vibrant life within them, a vision which is the basis of Levertov’s first book, published in England before her emigration to America. “Cedar Tree” is a poem of frustration: touching the tree doesn’t produce the frisson of connection with the poet. ' (Introduction)