AustLit

'With one small qualification I’ll come to, I enjoyed this book. It comprises twenty-five pages of illustration followed by twenty-six poems, and the integration of the two art forms is most skilfully done. Indeed, if artfulness were not in its present epoch of beggary, then the exquisite watercolour illuminations of shells and marine mortuary here, together with these shapely poems, might merit being placed within a finessed sample of bookcraft, hardcover, saddle-stitched, marbled endpapers and tasselled bookmark such as that quiet craftsman Alec Bolton used to create on his Brindabella Press. But the paperback we have from RMIT University Link yields a volume workaday and effective enough. In the first half of the book it displays nautilus, cone shell, seahorse, conch, each with an arresting singularity on a creamy page, while the poems that commence halfway through disclose Morgan-Shae’s commitment to the wrought-ness of verbal art, shapeliness as a presence-in-words for ear, eye and intellect.' (Introduction)