Janet Upcher

The eponymous poem in Caroline Caddy’s latest collection Esperance captures a breathtaking glimpse of a bay on the Western Australian coast. Immediacy epitomises Caddy’s poetic gift. In deft strokes, she provides a vivid land/seascape, compressing an astute reflection on history, geography, and humanity’s irrepressible need to explore beyond known boundaries. The language is physical and sen ... (read more)

Ecopoetics is tricky terrain which, in these poems of ‘forest and water’, Louise Crisp encounters sometimes with agility, sometimes faltering. Perhaps that’s intended. The cumulative effect of this collection is one of an overland trek, gradually ascending from ‘poisonous lowlands’ to the harsher, restorative air of ‘uplands’. ... (read more)