Margaret Scott’s Collected Poems gathers work from a poet of migration, weather, illness, memory and Tasmanian landscape.

Scott was British-born and became a major Tasmanian literary figure; the poems carry that double sense of arrival and estrangement, attentive to place without turning landscape into postcard scenery. Houses, gardens, snow, hospitals, children, ghosts, mothers, migration, language and aging recur as charged surfaces. They are keepers of lucid restraint, grief is held in the hand rather than waved around, beauty allowed to stay slightly cold, image doing the thinking before explanation wakes up and peers in.

A strong local poetry object. 

Montpelier Press paperback, 2000. Collected poems by Margaret Scott; published in Tasmania with support from Arts Tasmania and the Australia Council. Light cover and edge wear visible; pages appear clean and readable. Solid copy of a relatively uncommon Australian poetry collection.