Leaf-stone-cover_Layout 1
Published: 2012
No of Pages: 95
RRP: 24.95
ISBN Print: 978-1-921556-32-6

Leaf and Stone

Over fifty years Margaret West’s poetry has developed in tandem with her acclaimed art practice, which is distinguished by its intellectual rigour, its innovative edge and its unique poetic sensibility. Leaf and Stone contains a distillation of the thinking and writing of a mature artist at the height of her powers.

“I am momentarily absorbed – I almost said ‘enraptured’ – by ‘Remarks on Yellow’, and am confident that the same, slow-opening pleasure awaits me with almost every other piece in this collection when I read it, as I will, for the third and fourth time. Her sense of the tangibility of language is almost Rilkean. I’m reminded, considering these poems’ web-like delicacy, their humour-with-a-steely underlay, that the spider’s thread – so fragile! – is one of the strongest substances in the natural world, and that properly strung – and West strings it properly – it can capture moonlight, heartbreak, stars.” David Brooks

“Meditative, subtle, imagistically precise, this beautiful collection offers an exquisite encounter with the natural world and seeks within it recompense and analogies to our existential woundedness. There is an enormous integrity here, a lovely restraint and poise, and a deep conviction that the elegiac exists alongside praise-song. Leaf and Stone is a volume to cherish…” Gail Jones

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About the Author

Margaret West

Margaret West was born in 1936 in Melbourne, her formal studies include art, music and philosophy. In 1979 she moved to Sydney, where she taught art theory and practice at Sydney University College of the Arts from 1979 to 1999. She travelled, exhibited, and lectured extensively in Australia and overseas and her work is represented in major public national and international art collections. Her essays, and poetry are published in anthologies, journals and catalogues. She has also (self)published several artist’s books which develop a dialogue between text and image. Her work is broadly informed by interests which range through art, literature, music, philosophy, science and technology. The metaphoric potential of the everyday world and concern about political issues provide grist to her mill. Since 2000 Margaret West lived in Blackheath in the Upper Blue Mountains of New South Wales, where she worked full time as an artist and writer until her death in 2015.

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