Distance

With its beer-drenched Blundstones cricket balls retrieved from neighbours backyards misbehaving pastors kids and crabs plucked from the Moyne river OReillys poetry collects and curates a series of vernacular objects and experiences that comprise life in Australia and beyond. From the streets of Ballarat to the dry highways of West Texas from the floor of a petrol station in rural NSW to the evening sky seen from a Scottish beach this poetry traverses continents testing spaces and locations and finding them brimming with their own types of desire. Using a light touch and an elegant voice Distance traces out nostalgias peculiar contours and emotional resonances resulting in remarkable poetic moments that will return and whisper again to a reader even after the book is set down. - Lachlan Brown author of Limited Cities Joseph Brodsky the Russian Nobel laureate once remarked that memory and art have in common the ability to select a taste for detail. In the work of Nathanael OReilly memory and art come together to bring us poems that remember what cannot - what must not - be forgotten in rich and telling detail and with a taste for quiet but incisive irony. - Paul Kane author of A Slant of Light Work Life and Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity Nathanael OReillys poems sound the major themes of Australian poetry: landscape displacement yearning and above all a critique of cultural narrowness. OReillys plain-spoken diction is often laced with understated wit but is given ballast by its principled grounding in lived experience. - Nicholas Birns editor of Antipodes