Cirrus@Austlit

'Praise for The Tiny Museums

'This richly imagined and sensuous collection understands human longing. It vividly conjures childhood, and presents adulthood as a series of sometimes haunted negotiations between past and present. A number of poems also conjure dynamic visions of works of art. For Carolyn Abbs, apprehending the world is often a matter of seeing and touching what she knows. She addresses deep issues through making complex linguistic textures and evoking intimate poetic registers. PAUL HETHERINGTON

'Carolyn Abbs deftly creates the world of her book through a phenomenological approach. Elegant layers of textures, colours, sounds and movement invite the reader into numerous exchanges between the past and the present. In this way, her sensibility is painterly but it’s a Northern light in her poems reminiscent of the crisp mysteries of a Vermeer painting. Abbs’s poems dealing with family grief are centrepieces of the book and admirable in their ability to move the reader without overt sentimentality. Along with a skilled attentiveness to the ways in which sound moves through a line, this beautifully modulated emotional intelligence is a very great strength of her poetry. Via The Tiny Museums she bestows on her readers ‘a kind of overgrown underground’. LUCY DOUGAN' (Publication summary)