The Flowering Dark

THE FLOWERING DARK practises a gardener's care on language, on memory, family, place, on art, and being in the world. The great joy of these thoughtful, tender poems is the scent of earth on them, the carolling of birds, the fall of rain, the play of light, the sound of the river, the slosh of the bucket, the texture of seaweed, the impasto of paint on a canvas. Here is a poet of philosophical refinement and linguistic delicacy, who is happy to get her hands dirty. The book begins with what might be a mythic memory of childhood and continues through the landscape of a long life, as much of it spent inside the mind as outside the house.

These lyric poems calibrate the seasons of a speaker's inner life-her sorrow and gladness-with the concrete mysteries of the outer world. "Outside," she writes, "there's so much on offer. Lean in/ and listen to correas filled with the song/ of honeyeaters...".

Wry, ironic, delighted and devoted, these poems walk in light and anguish and never stop recalling that there is no darkness one can encounter that does not know how to flower.