In these poems, history is lived in the intimate. Personal stories explore war, change, family and friendship – in Ireland, Turkey, the Balkans and Australia.They touch on Cork, the city from which the poet’s family emigrated to Australia and where an Armenian created Hadji Bey’s Turkish Delight; Sarajevo, flowering now after a brutal war; Alcock and Brown and their pathway from POW camps to fly the first crossing of the Atlantic; Titanic with her very modern story; and Turkey, a country for blossoming friendships and love. The ephemeral nature of empire, its intersecting shifts, make up the map. Exile, belonging, love, loss and longing, are the grit that created the mosaic of these poems.
Theo Dorgan: 'Here are powerful, wise poems of humane sensitivity and good sense, a voice pitched always in the true register of compassion. Here, too, are carefully-placed mirrors and prisms where the light of memory turns and twists to offer up pictures that still hold important stories from our living past, luminous meditations that open up original avenues of vision and thought. The good poetry will always find fresh ways to negotiate between the private life and the larger history — and these are true poems of that invaluable kind. Straight from the heart.'