[New-Poetry] Re: chapbooks

[ralph at walleahpress.com.au]

>Carolyn Fisher's manuscript,* The Unsuspecting Sky*,
>was the winner and was published in October 2008.
>It was Carolyn's first chapbook and has been well
>received -especially in her home state of Tasmania.

Further to that, from Tim Thorne's launch of the collection
(http://www.walleahpress.com.au/FR38Thorne.html):

Carolyn’s strengths include a remarkable eye for telling detail, an
ability to cast that detail into crystalline imagery, and an
overarching compassion which not only informs the work but fixes it
in the heart of the reader.  To take just one example, in first
stanza of the poem “Pademelon” we are shown “the sunrise / of
her underbelly”, a well-observed and delightfully captured detail,
but the poem immediately goes on, “
slowly setting / by the side
of the road”, building the original metaphor into a conceit, but
maintaining the tone while deepening the emotional content and
advancing the narrative.  All this in about a dozen words.   But
that’s not all.  The poem has started, a couple of lines earlier,
with “the full stop”.  This is in itself an arresting opening.
After all, we are used to poems ending with a full stop, not
beginning with one.  That this is more than just a clever device,
however, is clear when we realise that the poem has started with the
ending of a life.  The “full stop” is more than a conceptual
metaphor, however; it is also, from the perspective of the driver/
poet, a visual one: one tiny corpse in the whole scheme of life,
roadways, traffic,  busy-ness.   That it is followed, “a couple of
hops / further on” by the “tiny comma” of the joey, is not only
felicitous as reinforcing and unifying imagery, but it marks the
significant shift in the dynamic of the poem, out from observation to
engagement.  So, having started with a full stop, the poem restarts,
as it were, with a comma.

Ralph