Highly Commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished
Manuscript. "Carolyn Abbs's poems in her poised collection The Tiny
Museums live in the gap between deep time and now. They are insistently
alive to the rich tensions between those two registers. This pairing of
past/present plays out in other unifying doublings and mirrorings,
particularly those between the UK and Western Australia, between
photography and poetry, and a fertile creative relationship shared by
sisters. Abbs deftly creates the world of her book through a
phenomenological approach. Elegant layers of textures, colours, sounds
and movement invite the reader into an experiential sense of this trench
between the past and the present. In this way, her sensibility is
painterly but its a Northern light in her poems reminiscent of the crisp
mysteries of Vermeer. Abbs's poems dealing with family grief are the
centrepieces of the book and are admirable in their ability to move the
reader without any cloying sentimentality. Along with a skilled
attentiveness to the ways in which sound moves through a line, this
beautifully modulated emotional intelligence is a very great strength of
her poetry."--The 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award judges' report. (Series:
UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]
