AustLit

'There are those who caution against judging a book by its cover. However, were you to pluck Jane Frank’s Wide River from the bookstore shelf, feeling compelled to dive into the marvellous, multi-hued blue river painting on the cover, you would find your choice vindicated by the poetry within. Frank is a poet of endings. Her last lines are replete with meaning, some forming a clever volta, others punching home the point of a poem with the power of a Shakespearean heroic couplet.'  (Introduction)

'In every poetry collection, there is one aspect, one overwhelming impression, that we are left with which later comes to define it for us. In Frank’s Wide River, it is the poet’s quiet insistence on reawakening us to the essential wonder of our world that stays with us. In the course of twenty-seven poems, the possibility of any expected or staid response is deliberately peeled away; if familiarity breeds blindness, Frank’s overwhelming achievement is surely to restore us to a gloriously sensitised vision of things:...' (Introduction)

'Wide River by Jane Frank,  Calanthe Press 2020, was launched by Nathan Shepherdson on 16th August 2020, at the  Under the Greenwood Tree Bookshop and Art Gallery, Tamborine Mountain, Queensland.'