Suzanne Verrall, One Day I Will Go There (Limited edition hardback)

Welcome to the city, like Adelaide but not Adelaide, with its office buildings, restaurants, cinemas. Big enough to boast a park where one may row a boat across a cement-bottomed lake, small enough to feel safe at night. The suburbs are nearby with their backyard gardens – fruit trees and veggie patches, the beach not much further. People go about their daily business: working, playing, having families, visiting the dentist, taking night classes, building boats in their basements. Cats and dogs are favoured pets. The circus comes to town. Equal parts realistic and unconventional, the 77 poems in One Day I Will Go There portray a world within touching distance of our own, where the familiar is made extraordinary and commonplace experiences resonate with metaphysics. A neighbour glimpsed leads to a realisation of loneliness, an unsatisfactory day at work becomes a celebration of parenthood. As these moments build so too does a vision of the modern urban world that is at once comic and heartbreaking, challenging and bittersweet. The collection is in three parts. Part 1 is an examination of childhood and family: joy and discovery, learning and play, ageing parents, familial role reversal, self-doubt and the burden of unrealised potential. In Part 2 the focus shifts to the practical difficulties and emotional hauntings we encounter throughout life: hidden agendas, human error, feelings of inadequacy; but also life’s possibilities and wonders. Part 3 centres around ideas of the sacred and our yearning to move beyond everyday trappings towards a more profound level of understanding and a greater appreciation of beauty. Singly, each poem is an imagistic microcosm, encapsulating in miniature an element of human life. Read together, they create a composite portrait of existential questioning and a playful reflection of the world in which we live.