Sudden Valley Press

This is an extremely resonant, well-turned collection, quick with observation and insight. The title poem – with its brisk nod to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and the famous Bruegel painting which inspired it – invites us to embrace a far wider consciousness of the natural, non-human world, a world of ‘heaping seas’, ‘green/planthoppers’, ‘a drift of geese’, ‘scribbly gums’, ‘a tease of jasmine’, ‘the punch of wind’, ‘the Port Hills enveloped in fog’. These moments of celebration are constantly underwritten by strong intimations of the sacramental, of ‘psalms of sunlit wings’, of ‘the inevitability of angels’, of ‘moonlight walking on water’, but we are also never allowed to forget or ignore what it is to be ‘a huddle of bones’, subject to ‘bruised memory’, the salt of grief, ‘an ache for open sky’. These are poems which will make you pause and reflect as you read, and will continue to work on you long after you’ve closed the book.

– HARRY RICKETTS
Judge, 2024 John O’Connor Award

There is a part of the poet Philomena Johnson — she knows there is a part of all of us — that “follows the song/ of the spider asleep/ in its web, the song/ of the mountain breathing,/ the song of the worm…”. And just as she turns away neither from the loss life exacts nor the past with its hungers and hurts, so there are moments of the world — a remembered walk up from the ferry among spotted gums, the slow flight of the Canada geese from an estuary, first light on slate sea, last days of an ageing parent — that never turn from the listening part of the poet in each of us, the part of us that enacts, often despite ourselves, a deeper belonging here on this old earth. Philomena Johnson, in these accomplished small sculptures of voice, bears witness, as poetry should, to those moments when we let the real world look us in the eye and recognise herself there.  

– MARK TREDINNICK

There are so many love-songs in this fine collection. So many transparencies that give rise to a multitude of voices: to birds, to ocean, to wind. To darkness and to evanescent light – the heart engaged. Most of all, it’s the story of a love affair with poetry. First off, we meet a child, sitting on a stone wall, drumming her heels as she reads her way into a poem. Language opens up there. Each word is a place to be free. It’s a freedom pursued into a lifetime of writing. There are signs and companionships all along the way. You can see them, says the poet (as did Emily Dickinson) by dint of reverie.  Like any work of excellence, you will end up somewhere else when you read through the poems in this lovely book. A quintessential question will haunt you. How are we to live truthfully and courageously in our precious, articulate world.  

– BERNADETTE HALL