Plague Animals, Edwards Rebecca

In this long-awaited second collection, award-winning poet Rebecca Edwards distills the experience of physical and mental trauma; the breakdown of her relationship with her eldest daughter, the attrition of mental illness. Each poem is an act of salvage, commemorating and celebrating the small, the overlooked, the voiceless and unloved. An artist throws his pots into the Brisbane River. Four dementia patients plot their escape from a nursing home. A woman mourns the end of a relationship at its conception. A man sees an ultrasound of his daughter and falls in love. Pain is forced to sing. The reader is asked to look again, to look closely, to see differently those things in themselves and others which convention frames as ugly or shameful, or insignificant. Subversive, quietly political, intellectually tough, exquisitely observed, the poems question what it is to be Australian, to be an outsider, to be human, to be uneasy in the world.

Rebecca is a woman who works with lines: ... material lines on the paper, in the fabric, wire, plastic and leather of her artworks. What impresses and affects me is the way in which she uses those physical, material lines to connect me to other lines of heart and thought and experience. -Dr Gina Mercer

Edwards changes the rules of poetry by altering what is acceptable subject matter... Like Sylvia Plath (she has) transformed pain into poetry. -Debbie M. Comerford

Edwards celebrates the contradictions of the body and the contradictions of the Australian landscape, the beautiful and the banal, the ingenious and the pedestrian. The texts that result are as sure as eroded stones. -Brentley Frazer

Edwards has a talent for articulating predicaments most of us are unable to express or unwilling to dwell on. At the same time her writing is much more accessible than some contemporary poetry. This poetry - ripe, sinewy, energetic - would be a good place to start if you are out of touch with what poetry can do. -Andrew Wallace (review of Scar Country in Idiom No. 23)

Rebecca Edwards is a poet and visual artist living in the Adelaide Hills. She lived in Papua New Guinea, Nauru, and various parts of Australia as a child, and went on a years exchange to Japan at fifteen. She has returned to Japan as an Asialink writer in residence and an Australia Council grant recipient, and has had two solo exhibitions at Atelier Gym, Tokyo. Her other solo exhibitions have been in Australia (Brisbane, Townsville and Adelaide) and New Zealand. Her published works are Scar Country (2000), Holiday Coast Medusa (2002), Eating the Experience (1994) and a young adult novel, The River Sai (2007).