Vagabond Press

'A dazzling work of the imagination by a mature poet working at the height of his powers, Peter Boyle’s Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is a book that ‘light[s] the darkness at both ends’. Its central sequence of narrative prose poems transports us to a wondrous archipelago of ancestral spirits who ‘sleep outside the folds of their own skin’, grow transparent at different times of day and ‘hold their bodies together’ only by ‘an enormous act of will’. Conveyed upon a ‘river / that carries night under the earth’, our journey is however no mere escapist fantasy to a dreamlike otherworld but brilliantly illuminates the mysteries of this one.  

Imbued with hard-won wisdom and displaying exceptional creativity, Boyle’s poems are as alive to ‘the thought-fibres of language’ as to the condition of silence and ineffability. A testament to poetry’s unique capacity for ‘thread[ing] the line of human story’ as ‘it fractures into wild deviations’, this collection re-imagines selfhood as mutable and relational rather than fixed and singular—as always already incorporating one’s forebears and companions, human and nonhuman. An elegant book of poetic transformations, it is also one in which ‘very slowly you transform into yourself’. 

2025 PM's Literary Awards Judges' comments

"With its beautiful pacing and intimate lyrical voice, Tais Rose Wae’s Riverbed Sky Songs draws us into its world of making and remaking, its sensuously crafted lines and graceful cadences braiding thought, emotion and image into poems that radiate wonder and beauty. Reading these poems, it feels like we are participating in their unfolding, in physical acts of weaving and shaping ideas and feelings into something real, something ‘to be held / with care, with custodianship’. It is a truly marvellous first book, its freshness of voice and vision promising restoration and renewal in its enchanting music and quiet, pristine beauty.

Riverbed Sky Songs opens with ‘Epilogue to Ceremony’, its first lines ‘We found an early dream of you / in the rockpool fringed with grass’ discovering a space for an exquisite conversation between unborn child and mother. From here a journey expands with the arrival of the child through vision to womb to encompass a poetic encounter with place and self over the first seasons of the child’s life. This intimate, delicate tracery of water and land, self, connection and solitude invites the reader to witness the intricate networks it maps. This is an intuitive, meticulously braided and integrated work of quiet, dauntless power, shaped by a quality of reverent attentiveness."

NSW Premier's Literary Awards Judges' comments