Cirrus@Austlit

'Yasmine Gooneratne was a poet, a writer of short stories and novels, and a literary critic, editor and reviewer. Born in Sri Lanka in 1935, while the country was still known as ‘Ceylon’, she was educated at Bishops College School for Girls and the University of Peradeniya, where she was a dedicated student of English literature. Yasmine was awarded a scholarship to the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, and she completed her doctorate there, as a Postgraduate student at Girton College. Her thesis was a groundbreaking one, and was one of the first published works of scholarship in the field of Commonwealth Literature. She is renowned as an Eighteenth Century scholar, and her books on the work of Jane Austen and Alexander Pope, published by Cambridge University Press, have been studied by university students all over the world.' (Introduction)

'Gemma White dedicates this collection of poems to ‘the man with the Red Hand Files Tattoo.’ I too subscribe to the Red Hand Files, a series of personal letters written by the singer/songwriter Nick Cave, whose personal responses to fans’ questions about life and suffering are thus rendered public and poetic. Like clearly calls to like.' (Introduction)

'When I first read these poems, of course I wanted to know what the poet was referring to as having undergone the process of ‘shattering’. So much in our world which we previously experienced as continuous or self-evident, both personally and sociopolitically, has been fragmented beyond repair. Clearly, the poems in this collection speak to the shattering effects of crises in the lives of people, some intimately known to the poet, and some whose struggles are revealed through statistics which reveal the collapse of societal safety nets and social contracts that were held by previous generations to be sacrosanct. And these lived experiences, if not ‘swept aside’, but faced, especially during times of sudden change, can shatter our sense of self, our preferred beliefs, and our certainties.' (Introduction)

'My review of this dazzling book has been delayed by my father’s recent death. But the greatest tribute I can give to Anne Casey is to say that reviewing her work has been one of my greatest consolations in the past several weeks. I find myself rereading the poems in this collection several times a day, like a devout person telling their prayer beads. This analogy feels like a natural one: the poems as a whole speak of faith, in human capacity for joy and connection, a reaching for what affirms life, expressed in longing for those things we have lost, and fear losing forever, during the ordeal we are all experiencing as we navigate the enforced separations and prolonged anxieties induced by the ongoing pandemic.'  (Introduction)