Brink

"One should never underestimate poetry's capacity to convey tender-ness. Brink's reflections on the life that was - home, husband, family, convention - are both touching and true. Charting the struggle to renew the self, the poems become more playful and confident with an inventiveness of form and exuberance of wordplay." - Deb Westbury

"Written from the intersections of science and religion, Charlotte Clutterbuck's Brink is a subtle, even delicate, narrative. In expertly constructed poems, we are told how a mature woman with grown children and a husband ('who was sensible when (she) wasn't') decides to 'step off the edge of (her) life', leaving her marriage to live with the woman she has come to love. Despite their emotional intensity, the poems in Brink are not without a wry humour. Nor do they shirk the consequences of the narrator's move ('no friends ring me / no mail comes / my children speak / stiffly on the phone'). Beyond this personal story, however, Brink is also concerned with cultural contrasts (Aboriginal and Japanese, in particular) and, most often, with the metaphysical gap between 'those who think they know everything' and 'those who think they know there is nothing'. For all her familiarity with cosmology and science, Clutterbuck, in 'Why I still go to church', continues to feel 'a charged stillness' there despite her rejection of conventional pieties. At every step, Brink asks challenging questions and eschews simple answers." - Geoff Page