In her second major poetry collection, Paperweight (John Hunter Publishers, 2014), Claire Gaskin dismantles language to explore the emotional and intellectual integrity of experience and liberates the power of imagery in moments of pure surprise.
Spare yet expressive, playful yet wise, Paperweight celebrates the visceral power of poetry and its connection to the body, personal history, and the emergence of the unconscious in us all.
Praise for Paperweight
Bonny Cassidy:
Gaskin blends plain diction with perverse metaphor and fateful enjambment: images accumulate then thin out, like a tide. One line can be as heartbreaking as a dream; the next will undermine the language of hypocrisy, violence, or moralism.
Michael Farrell, Weekend Australian:
Gaskin uses feminist structures to challenge what should not go unchallenged – and to affirm what should not go unaffirmed.
Ella O’Keefe, Cordite Poetry Review:
The concise power of the Imagist line is certainly present in Gaskin’s writing, but so too are the dream visions of Surrealism, the sparse clarity of the haiku and the ingenious metaphoric conceits of the metaphysical poets (this list is provisional and could keep going).
Michael Farrell, Rabbit:
‘One of the most interesting practitioners of the line — perhaps the most — in Australia is Claire Gaskin.
Claire Gaskin Poetry 