Collections - Acres of Light, 2017,

pbk, ISBN 978-1-910345-73-3
hbk, ISBN 978-1-910345-74-0
ebook, ISBN 978-1-910345-74-7

Acres of Light can be ordered from Arc Publications

Review from Anna Avebury, Ver Poets Poetry World, Winter 2016

This is a wide-ranging collection, as its title suggests, encompassing the poet's experiences both in London and in her home country, Australia. It is full of sunshine, in the optimism and positive, go-getting enthusiasm for life, We love life whenever we can although there is time, too, for the beauty of rain. The poet is conscious of the challenges of life, too, there is truth in the tales of acid rain, and the collection includes poems set in Ethiopia among Refugees at the Aid Centre, or in Vietnam 1965 and Ireland 1972.

The poet celebrates the everyday moments: children gallop to school; the stillness of Sunday morning in N22, that pause/when nature listens to itself; the travellers on the riverboat enveloped in cherry blossoms; the couples made luminous, heroic, by love.

However, the poet's awareness of the mystery of elements is never far away to lift the quotidian to another dimension; the call which draws the dolphin, the deep, the light to the dream which is the ocean.

Exploring its depths takes the poet to a variety of verse forms: haiku, ghazal, villanelle, and an ode, in addition to a myriad of individual forms, crafted to suit each subject, mood and tone. How else could you snow sachay if not in slim two foot lines, or the flight of a Boeing 747 be celebrated in an ode, if not expressed in neat, regular couplets. Apposite choices of words, phrase and image makes each poem a pleasure to experience, and to return to: My trek is restless for found treasure; or and the deep anguish/of belonging/is a starved knot.

Katherine Gallagher is a generous poet, sharing with the reader an indefatigable joie de vivre which it is always a pleasure to encounter, and return refreshed from the adventures on the page.

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