Leaf and Stone
Leaf and Stone was launched at the Sydney Writers' Festival on Monday 14 May, 2012. The launch and poetry reading was hosted by Susan Hayes, Director, Literature Board at Australia Council for the Arts.
For over fifty years Margaret West’s poetry has developed in tandem with her acclaimed art practice, which is distinguished by its intellectual rigour, its innovative edge and its unique poetic sensibility. Leaf and Stone, her new volume of poems and drawings, contains a distillation of the thinking and writing of a mature artist at the height of her powers.
"I am momentarily absorbed – I almost said 'enraptured' – by 'Remarks on Yellow', and am confident that the same, slow-opening pleasure awaits me with almost every other piece in this collection when I read it, as I will, for the third and fourth time. Her sense of the tangibility of language is almost Rilkean. I'm reminded, considering these poems' web-like delicacy, their humour-with-a-steely underlay, that the spider's thread – so fragile! – is one of the strongest substances in the natural world, and that properly strung – and West strings it properly – it can capture moonlight, heartbreak, stars." David Brooks
"Meditative, subtle, imagistically precise, this beautiful collection offers an exquisite encounter with the natural world and seeks within it recompense and analogies to our existential woundedness. There is an enormous integrity here, a lovely restraint and poise, and a deep conviction that the elegiac exists alongside praise-song. Leaf and Stone is a volume to cherish..." Gail Jones
Published by Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012
For further information : www.brandl.com.au