Recipient of the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Nathan Shepherdson’s surrealist, free-verse début, Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror, is to be commended for its emotional bravery and its originality. At the collection’s Queensland launch, Shepherdson described what he had hoped to achieve in writing an extended elegy to his mother, Noela Mary Shepherdson. The poems were to be seen as gifts or letters – one for each of Noela’s seventy-two years – and represented a son’s attempt to honour his mother’s life.