Acres of Light

The poems of Acres of Light offer a joyful rinsing of the senses. Katherine Gallagher's lines are rich with flowering almonds and eucalyptus, with exciting explorations of Europe and powerful memories of her Australian childhood. As she faces time and bereavement, there is humour and heroism in Gallagher's warm enthusiasm for saxophones, robins, the Boeing 747 and the Beatles. This is a book you will wish to be longer. These are poems which love our world.

Katherine Gallagher's new collection is bejewelled throughout with haiku-like moments of vivid observation. Her delighted responses — in particular to the natural world — serve to peel away the film of familiarity through which we usually gaze. Yet Gallagher combines such excited observation with a quality of restraint, a respect for what she encounters in a process of self-creation — "from myself into myself" as her epigraph from Rose Auslander puts it. Sequences about her Australian mother and the loss of her brother are imbued with this same gift: life is celebrated in poems that never forget our mortality: "This is time we have underlined, / remembering what we've done, where we're going" ('Quotidian').