RUNNER-UP IN THE 2024
JOHN O’CONNOR AWARD
I thought I came safe to shore.
from “The Caul”
There are other ways of drowning.
The Girl Who Sings Islands
by Catherine Fitchett
Available late February 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7385824-8-8
paperback; 88 p.
rrp $25
From the islands of the Pacific to Britain and Ireland and back again, Catherine Fitchett’s long-awaited first collection is populated by people past and present, real and imaginary, and sometimes both at once. A mirror holds a daughter’s past, a building unmakes itself, and the one that you love turns out to be “72.8% water and 4.9% grudges”. Those who know her work will be delighted to see so many fine poems finally brought together. Everyone else will wonder how they didn’t know about her already.
We should have planted dandelions.
from “Evidence”
They grow anyway. Better to believe
we wanted it that way.
The threads that Catherine Fitchett draws through this beautiful collection glitter and shine, seem woven from light itself. These poems are shutter-sharp on the fleet and elusive, on moments of transformation and points of connection.
– SUE WOOTTON
… now across the yard
from “Slant”
a spiderweb carried on the wind
one end anchored to the broken spouting
the other angled across the sky …
I am very happy to welcome this fine collection of poetry by Catherine Fitchett. Like the poet herself, her book is full of surprises. Her work is marked by a steady calm, a direct honesty, a wild and wicked sense of humour. And then there are the ‘islands’ – her love of science and art and literature and history and family. The weaving together of unpredictables. There’s a special sweetness that arises then. It lingers in the mind. And touches the heart.
– BERNADETTE HALL
Don’t get me wrong –
from “Photograph Without My Great Grandfather”
he isn’t dead yet, nor run off
and taken another wife, unlike
his father-in-law …
The dead and the living, absences and presences, extinction and that which remains all commingle in these pages. These are hymns of erasure in which nothing is ever truly lost, but transformed into something beautiful and strange. A ring dropped in the surf is borne away, in the poet’s imagination, on the turret shell of a hermit crab: ‘Somewhere in the ocean there’s a castle / that still wanders, barnacled and streamered // encircled by a band of incorruptible gold.’ And yes, the apocalypse may come, but ‘then the weeds will have no names, and no need of names.’ Quoting Dickinson’s ‘Tell all the truth and tell it slant,’ Catherine Fitchett’s poems zigzag their way to revelation, as the best poems do.
– TIM UPPERTON
Eyes closed, I dream
from “Edith Sings”
the stylus of the wind plays back their traces.
They might still sing, if I knew how to hear.
Take fact woven through with imagination or truth adorned with fable, add in the plain reality of the everyday re-housed into something other and voila! This molecular dance, this perfect alignment, of the the wider view and the more careful calculations of close observation.
This poet is as adept at distilling the expanse of buried histories down to their measure of salt, as she is at the unperturbed reversal of that process in order to carefully weigh the granular against the complexities of the universal.
Whether utilising a photographer’s eye to detect the play of light on water, wielding a trowel to dig for the truth of aftermath or a needle to sew the mystical into memory, still the centre of each poem holds fast to heart and hearth.
– KAY MCKENZIE COOKE
I am the child who has run ahead on the path.
from “Kitchen Sonnets”
I glance over my shoulder, you are no longer there.
I am as strong as eggshells, and ready to break open.
Available wherever good books are sold, or direct from SVP by clicking below:
Sudden Valley Press 