AustLit

'The Impossible Shore is a lyrical haunting of diverse lives and landscapes through a range of poetic forms. In her debut collection, Jo Gardiner gives voice to a revenant John Shaw Nielson, who conjures nomad songs from the harsh country he walks; to an old nun in a medieval monastery holding vigil over the body of a fellow nun she has lived and worked beside for seventy years, but to whom she has never spoken; to an emperor’s grief and loss in 19th century China; and to the experiences of patients incarcerated in the Mayday Lunatic Asylum in 1878 Beechworth. With their lyrical impulse, the poems progress through repetition, echo and variation generating a music of the hidden passages of life. 

'The natural world is central to preoccupations of The Impossible Shore, offering a celebration of the Australian landscape at once mesmerising and haunted. The Impossible Shore is a debut of formidable technical skill and deep imaginative integrity, opening to awe through the light and darker spaces of imagination.'  (Publication summary)