Cirrus@Austlit

'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)