Cirrus@Austlit

'In his book Undersummer Graham Kershaw considers how “all that time and tides … set apart/only simple words can hope to reconnect”. Critically aware of time’s swift passing and “how frail the scaffolding of the day”, he presents clear-sighted reconnections, especially apparent in evocative poems about revisiting the Lancashire of his birth. Now resident near Denmark, WA, he reflects how he and his family have built “by southern seas the home we never left”. He is a poet of honesty and vulnerability, not one “to wear the world lightly” – which is tough on him but marvellous for poetry readers everywhere.' (Source : writingWA

'Even in the dark, Peter knew he lay in the infirmary. No other room in the school was half so quiet. He could feel the familiar band of stiff, white linen, tight across his chest. All the boys had been there at some time or other in the past, at least for a few minutes - one long procession of bleeding knees, elbows and toes over summer, stepping up to be daubed with blood red mercurochrome. Peter hated the angry look of the stuff, more than the sting of the smell - there was a kind of violence in the colour, The boys all looked like branded sheep, coming out into the sun, blinking, lost lambs looking for their mothers.' (Introduction0