AustLit

'Sunday Morning, Here is Jill McKeowen’s first collection of poetry, articulating an acceptance of impermanence and loss, and consequent arrival at a sense of identity and place. Moving from teenage years beside the “lapis-lazuli ocean” of the Central Coast of NSW to a last home in a post-industrial suburb of Newcastle, the poems record the details of very Australian lives, troublingly settled on “deeply storied ground” but blessed by childhood memories of a family with love behind its purpose (always). Beside an awareness of war and damage elsewhere, they celebrate the transfiguring possibilities of the everyday: the layers of the past in an old Swan teapot; the bits and pieces left in a dead father’s shed; the “pilgrimage of woodsmoke to the stars.' (Publication summary)