The book’s first section, ‘West’, tracks the speaker’s observations and memories of ordinary Sydney life. This quotidian sphere of the personal is celebrated as unexpected pleasures are discovered within the ordinary, such as ‘the things you notice when you leave’ a familiar neighbourhood. But this realm is also shown to have troubling undercurrents. In the poem ‘Georges River’, for instance, the poet, like a journalist, watches as police divers trawl the river for its ambiguous hidden cargo, broken cars’ ‘twisted bodies, dripping and slimy / from the dark water’. In ‘Scratch’, the speaker gets into her car at night, afraid of ‘shopfront shutters’ and ‘each beardhair scratch’, assuming that the knuckles that ‘beat against the windscreen’ are malicious, intruding upon the tight cocoon of the car and of the self. Even the remembered worlds of childhood and youth, so lovingly suggested in strings of imagery, are also seen to have damaged the speaker: those ‘things / that jostle and bruise inside blue backpacks / and are never unbattered again’.

In the section ‘Bruising’, the paradox is made explicit:  a world is lovingly recreated through the observations of the poem and yet that same world can also be marred by loss and violence. In ‘Frangipani’, for instance, the poet observes the beautiful flowers’ ‘quick withering, the brown bruising / leprous on the fringes of their skin’, a powerful image that evokes anxiety and a dread of mortality that can stain the beauty of the natural world and life’s experiences. In ‘Treehouse’, itself a site of precarious youthful passion, love and lust are inextricably mixed with the contaminating ‘smell of rodent shit’. In ‘Kinglake’, the poet grapples with both the destructive power of Victoria’s terrible bushfires and the limitations of poetry – and indeed of any language – to articulate such horror: ‘I send you irises, / and try to write / some kind of greeting.’ The delicate beauty of the poem’s images – ‘the downy weight of ash’, ‘A silence / eucalypt and lunar’ – offer a measure of connection, but recognise their inability to either fully represent or compensate for this kind of suffering.

Such vital questions for poetry – how to find those right words, and how to find a position from which to speak that not only offers a perspective but also acknowledges the particularity of that speaking position – is revisited in the section ‘Inheriting Colombo’. Here, the poet juxtaposes her travels to Sri Lanka and South-East Asia with her grandfather’s wartime experiences, which she can only imaginatively reinhabit. She bravely identifies the inevitable contrivance of such acts of the imagination; that no matter how hard one listens or empathises, there will always remain a crucial gap between the poet-observer and what is observed or evoked. In ‘Watching’, she slips between details of her grandfather’s stories and memories (‘capturing a mascot monkey’, or ‘trading teenagers / three cigarettes / for fresh-caught fish’) and her own contemporary experiences (‘... sushi / at media launches’), reiterating the poet’s questions: ‘How can I talk ...’, ‘How can I write of the sinuous coil / of trishaws ...’

The book’s final section, ‘The Waters’, draws together poems that touch upon those very Australian experiences of water, its plenitude and its paucity. ‘Pacific Song’ takes us into the world of childhood holidays to the beach, children in the back of a car taking the highway to the coast: ‘We dream. We drive. It drizzles, / and yet we dream of sandbars.’ In ‘Old Jindabyne: Flood’, a familiar landscape of place and time is subsumed by the rising, obliterating waters: ‘The waters rose, cold as a chaste kiss, / and the cartography of our childhoods / we left behind.’ In its companion piece, ‘Old Adaminaby: Drought’, the process reverses, and ‘we see our old town excavate itself ... unmoored verandas like loose teeth’. In this dehydrating environment of salty desiccation, ‘old roads are tightened / like our skins, and fissured; / We can see how much we’ve shrunk’. In the collection’s final poem, ‘Scarborough’, the poet from Sydney’s inner west tackles the hugeness of the dry continent and its roads, to reach another west, another ocean: ‘We have outstood it, / the road.’ Yet even the relief of the ocean, whose bowl ‘sweeps us, / and we are good’, is also tempered by its power, its effect upon the fragile ‘chambered’ chest of the speaker: ‘We have buffeted our backs against the ocean. / Bouldered and eroded ...’ Like knuckles on a door, Wright’s poetry suggests that the nexus between inside and outside, the self and the world, remains uncertain, a call to an always risky opening.