Speaking With Ghosts
210 x 148 mm 68pp paperback. perfect bound
Ginninderra Press 2002
Price $AU 18.00
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About the book
'Lyn Reeves' poetry is characterised by a finely attuned feeling for landscape and for sensory impressions that accompany intense emotional experience, as well as by a keen apprehension of the tensions inherent in social relationships.' - Angela Rockel
'At the beginning of Speaking with Ghosts the poet invites us to come with her to a secret place. In poems filled with colour and the light of sun, moon and stars, her breathtaking imagery and magical use of words takes us with her into the world, to memory and to journey within, as she lets the secrets out. Lyn Reeves' connection with the world is palpable. Even when she writes of longing, loss or grief, the poems are celebratory. Each one embodies aching tenderness for the fragility, joy and wonder of life in this world. This is a book to fill the mind's eye and stir the soul. Read these poems: feel them sing in you.' - Robyn Mathison
From a review by Patricia Prime in Stylus:An interesting photograph by Andrew Reeves of a sculpture by Sally Curry, 'Burnt by the Moon', decorates the cover of Lyn Reeves collection Speaking with Ghosts. The sculptured head throws a shadow against a wall indicating that the reader may be in for a sensory as well as an emotional and psychological experience when reading these poems...
...The poems in this collection are filled with Reeves' glowing imagery, and reveal some of the secrets she talks about in the opening poem. Several poems in the collection are about children and the idea of childhood dominates the first part of Reeves' collection. For Reeves, it is a time of intense feeling, but is not sealed off from subsequent living. It represents a state of harmony from which adults exclude themselves at their peril. Several touching poems in memory, or half-memory, of childhood evoke a feeling of estrangement and loss, such as in the poem 'Coral Sea Park:'
Mum tells about a boy
trapped in a landslide.
Sand smothered him.
Her best poems grip the physical details of everyday events, earthing and refining her feelings. There's a touch of anger, loss and brittleness drifting through some of the poems. The poem "Camouflage", for example, shows us the child as "animal", "sensing prey / biding time for attack". One admires the individuality of each poem, the way they focus on an aspect of the poet's life, and their potential freshness.