Max Milligan's images convey the serene beauty & unique aura of these sites, & range from descriptive & informative views to strikingly abstract & inspiring compositions. The text by Aubrey Burl, the acknowledged authority on the subject, offers detailed historical accounts & descriptions of the sites, & recounts the powerful myths & legends that have surrounded them & persist to this day.
...
In her new collection, Katherine Gallagher draws on a rich inheritance from her different worlds: Australia, Britain
- particularly London
- & France. Her subject matter ranges widely: travel, exile, returning, change, nature, war, family, illness, love, loss, death & childhood experiences, always rooted in a passionate sense of discovery & attention to place. She juxtaposes a mix of colloquial & more formal verse-styles to evoke immediacy & feeling with impressive clarity & freshness of voice. Lyrical & politically-tuned, her poems range between moments of deep feeling & satire, laced with an often wry humour veering towards the surreal. Many of the poems take the traveller as theme
- `traveller` in the widest sense, linking Gallagher`s personal experience to the universal & showing the juxtapositions & layers to be discovered behind the seemingly familiar as well as the unknown. She has a great fascination with the natural world, its vibrancy & colour
- expressed in moments of wonder & unease, as in her poems on environmental themes & in the eclectic sequence, ” After Kandinsky” with which the collection concludes. Her reflections on people draw in the multifariousness of everyday experience with wit, irony & elegance. ” Circus-Apprentice” is an engaging, distinctive collection notable for its variety & seriousness, its adventurousness with word & image, & its sometimes understated, but sharply telling, content. Gallagher`s poems combine candour & tenderness, humour & dark moments to tremendous effect.