Therapy Like Fish

A full-length book of new poems by Marcella Polain opens this volume and provides its overall title. Two further sections select generously from her earlier two books, with some revisions. Her lines in those earlier books dance on the page, always seeking a place to leap, and unexpected trajectories. Energy of rhythm and assurance of connection weave a remarkably wide territory of emotional understanding. The setting is Perth and its wheat-belt inland; the poems engage personally with the matters of childhood, adulthood and family, and with the girl immigrant's awareness of 'the salt of distant throats'. Polain's new poems focus her essential elan and fierce intelligence on the solitary psyche, summoning grief and fear in a place of stillness and vulnerability. This strikingly immediate poetry is probably her most searching and complex yet. Therapy Like Fish: New and Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2009 Judith Wright Poetry Prize in the A.C.T Awards.