About this book

The Beating Heart is an allusion to the continuous pulsing of feelings that lie beneath the surface reality of our lives. This 90-page collection of poems, which includes internationally published and awarded works, explores themes of memory, both personal and inherited; the spiritual dislocation that so often accompanies emigration; and above all the rift between what appears to be and what is felt.

Through her poetry, the author ‘slips into the lining’ of various experiences from a childhood in the ancient city of Rome, whose ‘famous walls bulged with sanctioned corruption’ to the loneliness of a London bedsit, ‘narrow as a capsule, a chilly low-cost limbo’, to the lure of a Sydney bushwalk, where ‘mist lies over the grass, the trees, the everything, as lightly as a suggestion’.

The elegant assurance of these meditative and melodic lines remind us that poetry can be, as the author believes, ‘a form of music’.