In Marlene Cookshaw's work time is slowed so that you can walk around in the moment, rub your knuckles on its nap, trace its lattice-work of airs and pressures, and touch the sensitive places left by accidents and old loves. Life seems to come forward to meet speech, even as speech is reaching to its edge. You breathe the salt tang of the particular.

See where the mind goes? Between the lovely knots, a silk always strong enough to bear its weight. That throwing's what I love, what I would give my life to. Lacinato. Champion. Rougette. Red cabbages dense and beautiful as turbans, roses, words, like a row of toothy kisses, sweet, unmanageable, raw. from Clear to me now

Marlene Cookshaw's poems are unusually beautiful and disturbing because her approach to poetry is so meticulous and her approach to life so open to transience and chance. Her art is both elegant and virtuous, a fine music focused on raw emotion, raw matter. What do her close observations of things teach her? 'To give yourself up/ to what wants you, over and over.' She builds her strong poems not as quake-proof rooms from which to view the tumult, but as catwalks reaching through untested space towards Change itself, so she can ask what it demands of her. - John Steffler