Range Light
Range Light is the powerful reward of waiting sixteen years to publish. There is a deep maturity in Louise Oxley's detailed and original observations of history, nature, art and land. With a richness of language, each word is placed in the line to expand, encompass and challenge. The way time tangles and untangles - forward and backward, in circularity, or on directed pathways - underlies much in the book. Acutely aware, like Citizen Riche in 1792, Oxley is 'seeing always, what is different from the known', making connections with the nature of our own inner world as well as our politics in the broadest sense, a tender subtlety in the handling of her subject matter. With the guidance of these poetic 'range lights' we move into an open understanding.
Robyn Rowland
There is a moment in Range Light in which the skeletal remnants of an animal are perceived as 'loss in scrambled code'. This is beautifully suggestive of
Louise Oxley's achievement - whether focussing on loss, hope, mortality, love, or the ambiguous presence of the natural world, her poems are always seeking to unscramble the codes in which the mysteries of experience come to us.
Ross Gillett
Louise Oxley's Range Light is a work of quiet accumulation. Attuned to the world and her place in it, Oxley writes with a deft line and precise gravity. In poems that take in the details-where to gather dulse, the 'empty, delicate angles' of discovered bones, the moment when 'autumn sun has steadied at the hilltop'-Range Light inducts the reader into a world thick with life and feeling and inquiry. Oxley reveals wonder at the 'true, clear/ account of Nature's phenomena' and invites the reader to experience the same wonder.
Kate Middleton
Poetry Editor, Island
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