AustLit

'In Glass Flowers, Diane Fahey explores many kinds of space – the enclosed spaces of rooms, art galleries, hospital wards, prehistoric caves, the airy, flowing spaces of gardens, and the sky’s infinite life. Her intense engagement with the natural world moves in new directions, ‘as we approach the summer years’. While some poems convey the freedom of the present moment – imaged by the long glide of a kelp gull, ‘a yielding, shaping gesture’ – others invoke the uncanny, as in ‘Unearthly’ where clouds at sunset, photographed from a space station, send out into space ‘thousand-mile shadows / cutting through that cold radiance, / probing the void.’ Fahey also directs her gaze at various kinds of creativity – in particular, paintings that explore the inner life of rooms, and self-portraits built from ‘coils and surges of / colour incarnate’.' (Publication summary)