Jo Gardiner, The Impossible Shore

The Impossible Shore is a lyrical haunting of diverse lives and landscapes through a range of poetic forms. In her debut collection, Jo Gardiner gives voice to a revenant John Shaw Nielson, who conjures nomad songs from the harsh country he walks; to an old nun in a medieval monastery holding vigil over the body of a fellow nun she has lived and worked beside for seventy years, but to whom she has never spoken; to an emperor’s grief and loss in 19th century China; and to the experiences of patients incarcerated in the Mayday Lunatic Asylum in 1878 Beechworth. With their lyrical impulse, the poems progress through repetition, echo and variation generating a music of the hidden passages of life. 

The natural world is central to preoccupations of The Impossible Shore, offering a celebration of the Australian landscape at once mesmerising and haunted. The Impossible Shore is a debut of formidable technical skill and deep imaginative integrity, opening to awe through the light and darker spaces of imagination. 

‘Ignites into its images, resplendent metaphor, offering its gifts of form and song.’ Eli MacLaren

Jo Gardiner lives in the Blue Mountains in NSW. She worked as a teacher and a psychologist. Most recently she was a finalist in the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, gained third place in the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Prize, and was Highly Commended in the 2023 University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. This follows publication of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction in Meanjin, Westerly, Island, and Growing Up in Country Australia. Her novel, The Concerto Inn, was published by UWA Publishing in 2006. The Impossible Shore is her first poetry collection.

Jo Gardiner, The Impossible Shore
October 2024. 148mm x 210mm. 96pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-72-7

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.