Paper Bark Press
Surviving the Shadow
Terry Gillmore
1990, 116 pages, hardback, 215x150mm
ISBN 0 9587801 4 5
Cover photograph by Juno Gemes
'Terry Gillmore's first collection identified him as a poet of unique voice and content. His second goes much further. Many of these challenging poems centre on the tragic loss of the poet's young daughter; they are a record of a shattering experience undergone by a highly intelligent man and those close to him. On the other side of despair is no false triumph, but a brooding honesty.
'Love, friendship and poetry have each become more, rather than less, substantial for Terry Gillmore, but differently contoured and wracked on human realities. 'The Art of Dense Conversation' holds poetry to be a place for what is really thought, and really experienced; Gillmore's lyric sensibility, sometimes erotic, sometimes speculative, is always grounded in these things.
'From back-to-the-land scenarios to the world of government administration, his poetry questions the adequacy of cultural and intellectual styles undergone by a generation. Terry Gillmore is, in our time, an Australian Orpheus, and like Orpheus, he is the singer of urgent and neglected knowledge.'
~ Robert Harris