OOTA is proud to announce the launch of two poetry collections, Rita Tognini’s Almost Like Home and Ross Jackson’s Suited to Grey.
“The tantalising title of Rita Tognini’s collection points to a poet exploring many questions about Australia and her place in it. The poems provide an intricate search for the subtleties of personal identity, stretched between her birth country of Italy with its wealth of family connections and memories, and modern Western Australia which has long become more than ‘the land of upside down’. This process is complicated but enriched by the thinking of a person for whom language is not just a means of communication but something in which she lives, as elemental as the weather. Italian and English help determine the way she experiences both inner life and the outside world, and give her a point of subtlety from which to view subjects as diverse as Emily Dickinson, scientific thought, the animal world, and Aboriginal culture.”
Almost Like Home is a poised collection of intelligence, sensory vivacity and ongoing curiosity.
Dennis Haskell
Emeritus Professor
Poet and Literary Essayist
“Suited to Grey is a collection which achieves a remarkable balance: ‘looking at cauliflower clouds / hoping to see a blood moon’, Ross Jackson brings us poems which encompass both the greying, down to earth realities of existence witnessed through ageing eyes and a pervasive wonder at the world. He has a sharp artist’s eye, as well as a keen desire to understand how people manage to survive in their everyday, ordinary lives. With nicely acerbic humour, he observes the ‘zombie moments’, whilst also noticing how ‘light from a streetlamp / lacquer’s silvery plants’. The ‘lounge room imaginations’ of suburbia, contemporary life in the city ‘renting rats’ rooms at the top of Escher stairs’, and the open landscape of the Outback, camping with spinifex under ‘stinging stars’, are all here, described affectingly. His empathetic ponderings about the need for human connection are very recognizable and moving and will strike chords for many readers.”
Jean Kent
The collections will be launched on Sunday, 2 June from 2pm to 4pm at Mt Lawley Bowling Club, Cnr Storthes and Rookwood Street, Mount Lawley.
OOTA Poets Rose Van Son and Kevin Gillam will be the keynote speakers and Rita and Ross will read from their collections.
Book Sales $25 each, EFTPOS available. Snacks provided and available for purchases.