AustLit

'In Vanessa Page’s Tourniquet, the reader enters a realm of shadows and light. Everywhere is heat. When the sun is the star, pun intended, as in the “sex-sweat heat” of the poem “Summer Solstice” (8), nature is all: “lorikeets / arrive like rain” and “Mango trees / wear fruit bling.” When the moon takes the stage in a one-orb show, lovers lie awake “coiling and uncoiling under the skin of python weather” as in the long, languid lines of “Time-share” (12). Like Romeo, the lover must leave first thing in the morning, just as “the night sky is decomposing.”' (Introduction)