This selection of Nicola Bowery's poems spanning thirty years and four collections highlights her attentiveness to the natural world and to human relationships. It also includes epicormic, new poems. A feature of the work is her sustained interest in the sequence as a vehicle to inhabit a poetic force field: a mermaid's passage onto land, 'Mothering words', 'A geography of marriage', an interrogation of memory and childhood. In the new poems the poet, who lives beside tall eucalypt forest, is captivated by its post-fire response. And finds evocative language for the coincidental riddles of 'covid time'.
The poems in Bloodwood speak a profound and wild truth, sung in elegant form...Nicola Bowery's words crack open the world.
Louise Crisp
(In Goatfish) The sea-maid's tale is one of the greatest themed poetic sequences in Australian literature - it is truly remarkable.
Pete Hay
In married to this ground Nicola Bowery's poems are a glorious balancing act: stillness and silence coupled with the strong, sinewy, subversive and ecstatic.
Adrienne Eberhard
child in the wings is a stunning achievement...this is incredibly beautiful, resonant, hypnotic writing - spare in diction, fragmentary and dream-like in its framing.
Melinda Smith
