A complex awareness of family life is at the heart of Lucy Dougan’s new collection. Its narrative interweavings lead us from the world of books and romance into motherhood and its immersion in the world of children, then summon up, in turn, the poet’s own childhood, and its barely recognised estrangements, ‘the father that I did not know’, and later a whole new family, to be reclaimed as her own. Dougan’s poems are alive to the intimations which exist at ‘the fugitive border of thought’, and celebrate the imagination’s power to mould, to recover, and to repair.

Lucy Dougan was born and grew up in Perth, where she now lives. Her first book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2000, and was praised for the ‘honesty and remarkable grace’ of its personal and intelligent lyrics. White Clay won the 2006 Alec Bolton Award for an unpublished manuscript by an Australian poet.