AustLit

'We are thrilled to have our poetry-loving paws all over the Sunline Press’ collection Cuttlefish: Western Australian Poets filled with over 80 poems by WA poets.

'“… a volume I hope will be read by an eclectic range of readers, offering a glimpse into contemporary poetry and its forms and concerns but also a reading experience guided by the very aesthetic of the book itself. It is a book to be read in a single sitting, or one or two poems savoured in a brief interlude found in the day. It is a small volume, a book that can be carried around, read on a train, a couch, a beach. It is not an anthology that needs to read formally at a desk, nor is it to be read and never picked up again. These are short poems that invite you to go back as many times as possible.” Roland Leach, editor.' (Publication summary)

'In his book Undersummer Graham Kershaw considers how “all that time and tides … set apart/only simple words can hope to reconnect”. Critically aware of time’s swift passing and “how frail the scaffolding of the day”, he presents clear-sighted reconnections, especially apparent in evocative poems about revisiting the Lancashire of his birth. Now resident near Denmark, WA, he reflects how he and his family have built “by southern seas the home we never left”. He is a poet of honesty and vulnerability, not one “to wear the world lightly” – which is tough on him but marvellous for poetry readers everywhere.' (Source : writingWA

The 2016 Anthology of Writing from the Tea Tree Gully Library Writers' Group

'Dick Alderson’s collection presents a wonderfully accessible poetry that draws on memories and acute observation. “Skein” recalls holding “the soft thread” of wool for his mother “in an almost embrace”. His is a quiet, gentle nature poetry. He listens as a “windmill groans and wheezes”; showing his equal adroitness with simile and metaphor, ibis are “like old aunts doing a chore thoroughly” and lemons are “tart sacs shaped like tears”. When fruit bats fly with “a dull umbrella-opening flop and flap” we become aware of his frequent playfulness, Alderson’s bats an Australian version of Yeats’s wild swans at Coole.' (Publication summary)

'This is a poet who sees the world in very physical terms and is enraptured by colour. Watts is a poet after D H Lawrence’s own heart, finding contemporary actions and events aligned with archetypal forces and our beings as genetically determined. The title comes from one of many powerful poems about her mother and father suffering in old age.' - Dennis Haskell (Publication summary)

'Helen Hagemann’s lines crackle with the energy of an arch observer. Although she often looks back, her nostalgia is an honest squaring with the world that never lets metaphor too easily ‘glaze’ a thing. And what a dense material world it is. These poems burst with a dazzling record of things that both tenderly and wryly evoke other decades and, in doing so, other ways of living. Her uncompromising yet generous eye balances an openness to fragility with the ‘red combustion of our lives’. - LUCY DOUGAN' (Publication summary)