This collection is relentlessly attached to life, barging into galactic boudoirs, unabashed, and suddenly shy, it loves; it dares the sacrament of flowers and tiny birds… audacious with courage born of joy, sorrow and a woman’s not very quiet desperation. A refuge for the rest-less in the age of eco-grief/anxiety, maybe. An overreliance on epithet’s, probably. conversation argues, answers back, yelling but occasionally at dead genius’s, departed eco-feminists, and mythological tree herders alike urgently seeking truth and evolvers of the human race. It begs a response, but tries hard not to command it. Sometimes successfully; a hue and cry, a boon and a balm for such times as these.
‘Oh val,’ the poet writes, ‘all I wrote this year were burning poems’ . And here they are, a collection whose pages burn with love, beauty, tenderness, fury, heart wrenching sadness & a desperate connection to the earth. These are poems where clouds are mermaids in velcro rollers written by a poet who tenderly cuts away charcoal bark in search of pink. These are poems of frazzled motherhood, the grief of the empty nest, the poet’s arse, her tits, her thighs that pedal a bicycle whistling a flying tune. Kerryn Coombs-Valeontis is a poet whose soul contains ancient trees, the wisdom of wombats and a carpet of pink brushed flannel petals. A poet who mourns a million putrefying fish piled along a murdered river. A poet who sings hymns to radishes, praises the grace of thick pumpkin soup and tells of the unbearable sadness when she loses her dog. In this poet’s conga line of life, she writes of her arse, branded and shame seared by father god’s belt. She feels the weight of it all and lays it bare in these poems, urgently saying what her tits cannot say. Ali Whitelock, the lactic acid in the calves of your despair.
