AustLit

'The great Irish poet Eavan Boland, who died on April 27, once observed that when female poets seek to write about motherhood, they are met with a dilemma: there is “a category of experience and expression which is poetic and all the rest is ordinary and therefore inadmissable”.' (Introduction)

'Judith Bishop’s second book is as brilliant and daunting as her first, Event, now more than ten years old. The voice of Interval is familiar from that first book, as are the general structures and assumptions of the poems but there are a number of developments, the most important of which, at the thematic level, are probably contained in the first section of the book which is devoted to poems about the experience of motherhood and parenting. At any rate, Interval, like Event, makes a lot of demands of the reader. Complex ideas are explored in complex poems and the range of interests very deliberately covers the spectrum from the atomic to the cosmos with humans and their distinctive experiences placed between. An additional difficulty lies in the way that the themes are interwoven. Although individual poems have the requisite stand-alone quality, thematically they are likely to tie in with any number of others. As a result, a critic isn’t going to be sure which is the best thread to tug first. Yielding to the structure of the book itself, I’ll start at the beginning with the poems about children.' (Introduction)