Legacy

Winner of the 2018 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript

Legacy holds a delicate strength both in form and subject. These are poems that reflect, with grace, honesty and a sometimes unnerving directness, on the complex interconnections of contemporary life. As the poet writes about her manuscript: ‘This volume explores the templates and legacies of our internal and external worlds, the psychological inheritance we share and pass on, the interplay between the prime influence of nature and nurture and the crucial, inherent drive for connection’. - The Dorothy Hewett Award judges’ report

This substantial volume is startling in its range: it encompasses elegies, love poems, descriptive pieces, poems of joy and of sorrow as Julie Watts ponders the legacies that form us through genetics and culture and that we in turn pass on. With considerable empathy and generosity of spirit she contemplates the old, the middle-aged and the young, the distant and near past, the present and the future, childhood’s imagination and adulthood’s sometimes tough reality. Idenitty for her is found in relation to others, in a world that is closely observed and closely imagined; life is a kind of music and she renders it with rhythmic and imagistic richness. - Dennis Haskell