Shortlisted for the 2008 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature, John Bray Prize. Judges’ comments:<\/p>\n
‘This is an exceptional first book. Clare Gaskin’s poetry is eloquent and attentive, bright with striking and precise images, yet has a darker undercurrent acknowledging absence and pain. She writes, often obliquely, of the elemental and the transient – children, flowers, cats, clouds, rain, birds, dreams, leaves and wind. Her spare, disciplined structures stringently contain and intensify the emotions evoked, and her sculpted style can make of a poem an almost tangible object of beauty.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From Gig Ryan,\u00a0Australian Book Review<\/em>, March 2007, p.64:<\/p>\n
\u2018In Gaskin’s long-awaited, first substantial book . . . [is] a partly surrealist mysticism, where observation precedes meaning \u2013 \u201cthe flywire cuts the sky into tiny squares. \/\/ in answer to your question there is none. \/\/ in answer to the fall is the ground\u201d. . . Gaskin\u2019s poems replicate the slipperiness of sensation and feeling, rarely with any overt continuous commentary; rather, they are often pointillist tics of images, often metaphor, forming matter as they progress . . . .\u00a0A Bud<\/em>\u00a0is shaped around repeated talismanic words, particularly “earth”, “air-wind-breath”, “fire-flame”, “water-river”, and many images and words repeat in different poems to create a reflexive continuity from these basic elements.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From Chris Grierson,\u00a0Readings Monthly<\/em>, December 2006, p.5:<\/p>\n
\u2018Book of the year? Poetry of course! Claire Gaskin\u2019s\u00a0A Bud<\/em>. I\u2019ve always held the view that her imagist poetry is some of the finest writing in this country full-stop. Like haiku at its best, it\u2019s beautiful, skewed and chillingly spare.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From Gregory A Gould,\u00a0Text Journal<\/em>, October 2008, www.textjournal.com.au:<\/p>\n
Written in a sparse, yet poignant style, Gaskin\u2019s poems do not hide behind language. In fact they celebrate it. Gaskin\u2019s poems breathe. [Her] bare-bones approach has the ability to stop time. Meaning can be boiled down to a series of everyday objects that, upon reflection, have always held some sort of secret significance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shortlisted for the 2008 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature, John Bray Prize. Judges’ comments: ‘This is an exceptional first book. Clare Gaskin’s poetry is eloquent and attentive, bright with striking and precise images, yet has a darker undercurrent acknowledging absence and pain. She writes, often obliquely, of the elemental and the transient – children, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}