AustLit

'Jena Woodhouse’s unassuming collection, Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems, reads like a humble offering and happy acceptance of hospitality. The chapbook came about when a representative of Calanthe Collective, a poetry group based on Tamborine Mountain, contacted Woodhouse after finding some of her early poems about the mountain among the late poet Val Vallis’s papers in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland. On many occasions in the 1980s and 1990s, Woodhouse and her family stayed as guests at Vallis’s Tamborine Mountain retreat, Abydos, where she wrote her first poems about this beautiful peak in the Gold Coast Hinterland. As Woodhouse phrases it, when Calanthe offered her this opportunity, “the interrupted dance was able to resume.” This is a lovely metaphor, indicative of the sort of imagery to be found in this book of poetry with its themes of heritage and history, nature and ecology, and hosting and hospitality.' (Introduction)