AustLit

'The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire’s maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice.

'The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law—that necessity is not a defence for murder—and is still taught at universities the world over.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What does it take to hold the sky in place?
The moving raft of sky a dark shadow of itself.
The miracle of it. All of us holding strings.

'From the Afterword:

'‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter came together slowly around preoccupations of safety and shelter at an individual, societal and global level. I also wanted to look at the tensions between digital and analogue reality, between the city and a natural world that exists without us, strange, compelling and precarious. At its worst these tensions become an imbalance, a violence, threatening not only the individual body but the entire planet.’' (Publication summary)

'Caren Florance works in the Venn overlaps of text art, visual poetry and creative publishing. Her work is hard to pin down, principally because the artist herself is not interested in a static outcome. Much of the work appears as a flux, a process or a continuum along a moving line that often explores language and our usage of it.' (Introduction)