Cirrus@Austlit

'This impressive volume keeps the reader in its strong, yet tender, hold. The poems are poised, poignant and braced with feeling, especially grief and loss, but there is joy, too, and celebration, especially of family. In poem after poem, Julie Watts delivers many perspectives, but at all points the human, geographic and moral landscapes are convincing and real. She can dovetail inner and outer worlds effortlessly. Her poems are probing, investigative, yet always humane.

- Judith Beveridge

'This substantial volume is startling in its range: it encompasses elegies, love poems, descriptive pieces, poems of joy and of sorrow as Julie Watts ponders the legacies that form us through genetics and culture and that we in turn pass on. With considerable empathy and generosity of spirit she contemplates the old, the middle-aged and the young, the distant and near past, the present and the future, childhood’s imagination and adulthood’s sometimes tough reality. Identity for her is found in relation to others, in a world that is closely observed and closely imagined; life is a kind of music and she renders it with rhythmic and imagistic richness.

- Dennis Haskell'   (Publication summary)