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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Praise for The Tiny Museums
'This richly imagined and sensuous collection understands human longing. It vividly conjures childhood, and presents adulthood as a series of sometimes haunted negotiations between past and present. A number of poems also conjure dynamic visions of works of art. For Carolyn Abbs, apprehending the world is often a matter of seeing and touching what she knows. She addresses deep issues through making complex linguistic textures and evoking intimate poetic registers. PAUL HETHERINGTON
'Carolyn Abbs deftly creates the world of her book through a phenomenological approach. Elegant layers of textures, colours, sounds and movement invite the reader into numerous exchanges between the past and the present. In this way, her sensibility is painterly but it’s a Northern light in her poems reminiscent of the crisp mysteries of a Vermeer painting. Abbs’s poems dealing with family grief are centrepieces of the book and admirable in their ability to move the reader without overt sentimentality. Along with a skilled attentiveness to the ways in which sound moves through a line, this beautifully modulated emotional intelligence is a very great strength of her poetry. Via The Tiny Museums she bestows on her readers ‘a kind of overgrown underground’. LUCY DOUGAN' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: For my parents, Alexander (Alec) and Betty McClair
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Helen Hagemann Reviews The Tiny Museums by Carolyn Abbs
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , February 2019;
— Review of The Tiny Museums 2017 selected work poetry -
Three Snapshots from UWA – The Criminal Re-Register, Ross Gibson; The Tiny Museums, Carolyn Abbs; Hush: A Fugue, Dominique Hecq
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Foam:e , March no. 15 2018;
— Review of The Criminal Re-Register 2017 selected work poetry ; Hush : A Fugue 2017 selected work poetry ; The Tiny Museums 2017 selected work poetry -
Confessional Intensity
2018
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 401 2018; (p. 40-41)'The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior and Carolyn Abbs’s The Tiny Museums. In both collections, the speakers draw the shapes of their internal furniture, while building monuments to the intimate scenes and common spaces that define them.' (Introduction)
-
Three Snapshots from UWA – The Criminal Re-Register, Ross Gibson; The Tiny Museums, Carolyn Abbs; Hush: A Fugue, Dominique Hecq
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Foam:e , March no. 15 2018;
— Review of The Criminal Re-Register 2017 selected work poetry ; Hush : A Fugue 2017 selected work poetry ; The Tiny Museums 2017 selected work poetry -
Helen Hagemann Reviews The Tiny Museums by Carolyn Abbs
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , February 2019;
— Review of The Tiny Museums 2017 selected work poetry -
Confessional Intensity
2018
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 401 2018; (p. 40-41)'The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior and Carolyn Abbs’s The Tiny Museums. In both collections, the speakers draw the shapes of their internal furniture, while building monuments to the intimate scenes and common spaces that define them.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2016 highly commended Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript