AustLit

'The decades in the making of The Blue Decodes have paid off. at the level of the book, it is a model of organisation; at the level of the poem, of balancing language, image, and of positive with negative affect in the lyric. There’s a sense of acceptance of the mundane in these poems, rather than that of a cleansed artifact (editing’s danger). In the book’s early poems, Lewis’s voicing modulates interior melodrama in modernist fashion: but perhaps more like Woolf than eliot. hints of religious desperation resemble similar phrasings by Emma Lew. There are some nice syntactic touches, too: “that you shelter, take in” (Vanguard); “where we don’t keep birds, God’s aviary” (in the Aviary). These are poems of mood and meditation. both back cover blurbers use the word “subtle.” The poems can seem expressionist, as if Lewis is designing a series of allegorical rooms.' (Introduction)