This is a first collection of poetry by award-winning young Sydney poet, poetry activist and editor Fiona Wright, and continues Giramondo’s policy of publishing new voices alongside those of established poets. The poems in Knuckled, as the book’s title would suggest, are themselves bony, stripped down to essentials, concerned with remnants and hauntings, and the small, everyday objects left behind after drama, or loss. They take up passed-down and overheard stories, and the histories and mythologies embedded in family lore and landscape. They range across the urban settings of Sydney, but also feature places as diverse as the flooded towns of the Snowy Mountains, the burnt-out landscape of Kinglake in Victoria, rural and coastal NSW, and especially the suburbs of Western Sydney, where the poet grew up and now works, and whose voices and perspectives she captures with unerring accuracy.
These themes are explored in Sri Lanka in the central section of the collection, ‘Inheriting Colombo’, an extended sequence which attempts to make sense of two different generations’ experiences of Asia, first during the Second World War, and now in contemporary times. Combining inherited stories with what might be called travel poetry, the sequence deals with the themes of war, colonialism, and displacement. Wright’s interest in Asia is also reflected in poems elsewhere in the collection set in Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. Another sequence of poems, ‘Page Three Girls’, focusses on the media, and how lives of women and girls are made mythic in the news.
Fiona Wright’s poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009 and 2010 (Black Inc) and in the Red Room Company’s Toilet Doors Project (2004). In 2007, she was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre. She holds the position of Publications Officer in the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
