Cate Kennedy’s poetry is grounded in the material world: bricks, paddocks, bodies, hospital rooms, machinery, weather, domestic work.

In The Taste of River Water, ordinary objects and gestures become points of pressure, carrying grief, intimacy, labour, everything that comes with being alive. A poem about laying salvaged bricks becomes an argument about competing versions of correctness; elsewhere illness, death and landscape are rendered with a restraint that makes them more rather than less affecting. There is humour here too, but it tends to arrive sideways, keeping sentimentality at bay. An excellent collection of contemporary Australian poetry for readers interested in the intersection of domestic life, landscape, mortality and the body.

Scribe Publications, Carlton North, Victoria, 2011. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf and edge wear, with minor rubbing to covers. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.