WRITING publicly about life’s most private moments has shaped Ormiston poet Maree Reedman’s first anthology, Clear Air Turbulence.
Ms Reedman will launch the recently published collection at Avid Reader, West End, on October 29, where she will discuss the book’s 23 short poems with Melanie Jansen.
Published by 5 Islands Press, the $20 anthology brings together work written across two decades and explores everything from marriage, grief and illness to the changing character of neighbourhoods.
“I’ve been writing poems for 20 years and it’s been a goal of mine to bring some of these poems all together in one book,” Ms Reedman said.
The 53-year-old said her poetry blended personal experience with observations of the world around her, using free verse rather than traditional rhyme.
“They are prose really. Some are a big block of text, some are sonnets,” she said.
“There are no rhymes. It is just something that comes.”
Inspiration can come from conversations with friends and strangers or from everyday scenes that refuse to leave her mind.
Ms Reedman said one poem grew from her frustration at seeing perfectly good homes demolished and replaced.
“I have written about how houses, perfectly good houses are being bulldozed, knocked down and re-built,” she said.
“I don’t like that perfectly good houses are going and no one is there to stop it. So, I’ve made this into a poem.
“I look at various topic areas in the world.
“Then I look at my place in it.”
The collection also deals with losing friends, her marriage, the death of her mother and medical issues.
“The arc increases in intensity as the book goes on,” she said.
But the collection is not without lighter moments.
Ms Reedman said one poem draws on her long-running habit of misplacing pens, a frustration that has left her husband reluctant to lend her one.
“This has got to the point where my husband doesn’t want to lend me his pens,” she laughed.
Her work has been described as highly crafted but quietly and modestly deployed to communicate matters that count, inviting readers to laugh, cry and be astonished.
The Clear Air Turbulence launch is at Avid Reader, 193 Boundary St, West End, from 6.30pm on October 29.
Tickets are free and available through Avid Reader.
