A collection of extraordinary depth and focus. Powerfully conceived and executed, these poems give complex voice to the multi-stranded miseries and ecstasies of the ghosts of the old Abbotsford convent: the bewildered orphans, left always with a childhood ‘that cannot unbandage itself’, the wild girls swimming the Yarra to freedom in the shadow of the Skipping Girl; and the nuns, whose sometimes punitive practice co-exists with a creed of love that offers moments of ambiguous radiance ‘as if an archangel tapped on your soul’.

Spirited and fugitive, lively and resistant, the girls in these poems speak through a powerful blend of the lyrical and the verbatim in a bare, intense, even visionary form of ‘writing back—against and into history. Patricia Sykes merges fluently into dramatic voices so busy at grief, fear and abandonment. She knows their restless sorrows but she also celebrates their ache to live and to find freedom outside their bind of protection and guilt. These are moving, compassionate poems full of the motif of river: life, undercurrent, debris - and the deeply aspiring self. 

…The work is, ultimately, an act of retrieval that is, by turn, luminous, wry, defiant and empathic. Patricia Sykes is a poet who knows not to be constricted by boundaries, who brings into play all the resources of history and reverie, remembrance and vision, in this supple interweaving of lyric intimacy, documentary, liturgy and plain-speaking.