Poetry, like the archive, is past but never truly passes. While reading Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane’s gawimarra: gathering, stories and memories become part of an interconnected land-space, where past and future mingle with the present. They are a ‘timeless’ or ‘all-time’ presences, and I feel their embodiment through Leane’s poetic yarns.

Following her award-winning debut, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887-1961 (Presspress, 2010), and Walking Back Over (Cordite Books, 2018), gawimarra is Leane’s third full-length poetry collection. Divided into three sections—‘gawimarra gathering’, ‘Nation’, and ‘ngulagambilanha returning’—this book gathers moments of embodied meditations where experience transforms into body and body into poetry. Presence is both visually and thematically prominent in this new collection.