AustLit

'Told through a series triptychs—each with a poem, a work of essayistic prose and a photographic image—White Clouds Blue Rain captures discrete moments of life with precise yet unpredictable detail. Taking cues from artists, writers and architects, Driscoll gently binds the everyday to the abstract, moving from the dual vantage points of an apartment block in Melbourne and a former family home in North Queensland out to questions of form, shape and aesthetics as well as the act of making and our relationships with people, objects and physical space. There’s a spaciousness and glasslike stillness to this work that carefully diffuses meaning, never allowing it to settle.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In turns unsettling and funny, Oliver Driscoll's debut collection is a testament to the mundane resonances of contemporary life and language. Driscoll's wry eye captures the subtle whimsy of the everyday, while exploring the capacity of its language to disturb the field of human meaning.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'A former rollerblading obsessive reflects on a youth spent skating in the Far North in the 1990s, and on what the sport’s dramatic decline has meant for the former professionals who once loomed so large in his imagination.'

'This work of non-fiction struggles with the technical and ethical difficulties of representing the former Yugoslavia, an area that has experienced deep trauma and that is at a remove from the author’s experience. The author-narrator confronts the challenges of representing others’ trauma in an oblique way: focusing on his own life in Melbourne and his responses to Yugoslavia’s past; critiquing narrative forms and particular literary works that represent the trauma, namely those of the Bosnian-American writers Aleksandar Hemon and Semezdin Mehmedinović; and acknowledging the vexed framework of the creative-writing PhD for which the reflection was produced.'  (Publication abstract)