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Selected and New Poems from one of Australia's most accomplished poets. "These poems are deeply rooted in personal memory and quiet emotional courage. They are vivid acts of seeing—contemporary free verse with the timeless quality of Japanese Tanka. You can hear rain in the garden, you share grief in the passing of beloved pets. Kathy’s writing is an unflinching testimony to truth and love and loss—a masterpiece of Australian poetry." – Judith Crispin, poet, artist and friend to dogs This is an unadorned poetry, aware that the poet is a conduit whose craft lies in an ability to take the most ordinary experiences and imbue them with extraordinariness, to find the transcendent in the physical, the complex in the simple. In her continuing commitment to the particularities of experience, Kituai takes us deeper into all our lives. This book is a pleasure to read and re-read. – John Foulcher, 101 Poems, Pitt Street Poetry Kathy Kituai’s craft is notable for carefully chosen diction and striking. Water becomes cream of black opal. After a rosella crashes into a window, “how loud the silence that follows.” In Papua New Guinea, the lines on an elderly woman’s face “swim the stories that have made such deep rivers.” – Moya Pacey, a poet This collection, like the jam that metaphorically spreads itself throughout, “sparkles like liquid gems in a momentary sun.” Kathy Kituai inhabits the moment: “she runs ahead to gather verbs”; sometimes fleetingly, “the sheer shifting of self from self to self”; and sometimes “tongue sweet with the moment.” Her poetry “carved on the side of this page can sing beyond itself.” – Sarah Rice, winner of the Ron Pretty Poetry & the Bruce Dawe prizes Kituai’s poems assure us, time and again, that right after saying goodbye, we are often saying hello. Departure leads to something new and worth examining through image and language. Through these poems, we also realise that in releasing old grief, we make room for the new in the form of image, insight, and experience. – Kimberly K Williams, Still Lives, winner, Canberra Critics Circle Award