Author(s): Leon Piterman

Biography & Memoir

Beginning with the simplest of things - native grasses - Adrienne Eberhard explores the beauty inherent in that which is ignored, overlooked or taken for granted. The first section of this fourth collection opens with poems that respond to paintings by Tasmanian artist, Sue Lovegrove, that depict the interrelationships between grass and wind on remote Macquarie and Tasman Islands. Further poems examine iconic grasses such as Kangaroo Grass, Tassel Cordrush. Knobby Clubsedge and Common Buzzy. Poems about animals anchor us further to the earth, in explorations of life and death, as well as renewal. Eberhard pursues her preoccupations with dualities: heaven and earth; past and future; memory and blood; family and generations in poems about pre - historic cave paintings; museum visits; female figures from the past such as Marie Antoinette and Cleopatra; family history in colonial Java and convict Tasmania; amatory and mother love, exploring the intimacy of connections. These poems are a form of archaeology - a digging deeper into the earth and the past, to find the threads that bind and connect.