'Whenever cities or towns suffer the roll-back or loss of their mainstay industry, the shared experience of pain engenders a feeling of deep nostalgia. The withdrawal from the account of substantial, secure, humanising employment, the depletion of the reserves of community building affluence and working pride, the wounding loss of individual and family dignity, for a while causes its people to question the structural security which underpins its ethos, its cultural norms and its civic identity.
'Steelworkers! Could But Your Atoms Talk is a series of sixty one poems, roughly sonnet-sized, about Steelmaking, its ethos, its engineering, its Illawarra environment and its people as seen through the eye of an ex-steelworker.' (Back cover).
