Helen Gee (Editor)

Back River Press

RRP $27.50 PB 273pp

The variety displayed in this anthology is startling. The voices which rise from these pages and the forms and diction they use are extraordinarily diverse.

The effect created is kaleidoscopic. Events like the death of a rider at a local race meeting, a convict uprising, the loss of a whaling ship flash into view and then give way to the more formal or sophisticated pronouncements on Tasmanian progress or liberty.

Helen Gee has done her state good service by bringing “River” together. She has, for one thing, given us an amplified vision of the past and in bringing forward among the established names a crop of up-and-coming poets, she has left us with high hopes for the future.
Dr Margaret Scott
Winner of the Society of Australian Women Writers Alice Award 2004