This book is a major contribution to important literature about families, mothers and daughters, the genre of memoir/autobiography, and the biography -- not to mention that it is a bold yet accessible experiment in contemporary poetic form. I would recommend it to any secondary or college teacher who wished to introduce students "gently" to the innovations that contemporary poets use to represent both themselves and "others" in striking and expansive ways, while not foregoing the rules of rhythm and diction that more conventional poets have traditionally used. Both the images and the language are those of so called everyday life, yet each little vignette offers a rigorously fresh approach to the challenge of representation. Moreover, there is nothing abstract or hackneyed about the pictures that are offered; another era, sensibility, consciousness -- each of these is offered to us in its full particularity, so that one puts down the book with a sense of having fully experienced, not just read about, two persons who are both familiar -- and wholly different from ourselves. The range of emotions is likewise both particular and broad -- being frustrated, angry, confined, impoverished, exhausted, overwhelmed, alienated, loving, and so on, is represented with a sympathetic stance and brush, and yet the small portraits do not exhaust the subject either. There remains a considerable amount for the reader to contribute to this experience, in both sympathy and analysis, so that the total experience of reading (individual poems or the whole) requires active engagement. I can't imagine a more appropriate selection for an anthology or textbook that wants to engage AND challenge its readers -- of all ages.

Leona Fisher
Associate Professor and Chair
English Department
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.

A fine example of what has sometimes been called 'poetry of the fact'. Like the American 'Objectivist' poet Charles Reznikoff, Venie Holmgren uses the details of actual experiences to imply their associated emotions. While this method is generally less spectacular than the heady metaphors of some other approaches it is more than appropriate to what Holmgren is attempting here - namely, to resurrect the spirit of her mother via the 'hard and long' domestic situations which both restricted and gave meaning to her life.

Geoff Page, Canberra

An amazingly haunting autobiographical work... Poignant but never sentimental. In language disarmingly simple and stark, these poems revisit pre-war (and post-war) country life, intimately revealing details of family poverty and struggle, of celebration and determination, of immigration, exclusion and loss. They constantly acknowledge the aching gulf between dream and reality. Above all, they honour the life of the author's mother. A wonderful book.

Jenny Bosse M.A.
Lecturer in Australian Literature at Heidelberg University, Germany (1981 - 1995)