Moving non-chronologically through youth and maturity, dreamscapes and time, Shari Kocher's long-awaited first collection charges the elusive music of cross-generational song-lines -- mothers and daughters, daughters and grandmothers, lovers and kin -- with the invisibles and intangibles of two decades spent honing her craft. This is a book about breathing. It is also about the changing contours of the journey home, even when the ground of what is meant by home seems most absent, impossible or undone. Rooted in place, yet animated by the immaterial, these poems breathe a body of living and loving alive.
"Shari Kocher writes poetry of incandescent power. In this stunning first collection, free verse is both stylised and fired by incantatory rhythms as much as by the poet's eye for crystalline image-making. Sweep away the snow and one arrives without preamble at the stoop of myth and memory." -- A. Frances Johnson
"This is a beautifully accomplished book, full of genuine poetry. The poetry is full of light, it is painfully real, its women are brilliant and hard working, the children climb trees, the men pick strawberries for their lover then deny it, frogs are in the pipes, and bindii patches infest the lawns. If there is an identifiable modern Australia out there with its distinctive images and its own cadences of speech, then such poetry is surely an essential part of it." -- Kevin Brophy
Shari Kocher is a poet and scholar whose work has been published over two decades in literary journals and anthologies in Australia and elsewhere. Born in 1975 in far north Queensland, educated in Sydney and in Adelaide, Shari has lived in many parts of the world, including Ireland, where some of these poems were written under the influence of ancestral ties. She holds a PhD from Melbourne University, and works as a freelance writer, researcher, editor and poet.
