Author(s): Claire Gaskin

Poetry

These poems are spare, in the tradition of imagism, from haiku through to surrealism and since; and they are oblique, worked between logic and illogic. The voice, among this, is lucid to hear. It is playful and wise; its reflections take the daily things and emotions, with a background of rural Victoria in some of the imagery; and its rhythms feel fresh to a syllable. There is no modish nervousness towards language's impotence. Claire Gaskin, in a style that she formed by the mid-eighties, keeps a modernist confidence in expressiveness. The poems here have been matured from two to twenty years, with an artist's instinct not to hurry. The words seem incised on the page for a long term. A bud was shortlisted for the John Bray Prize in the 2008 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.