Fiona Wright

Many of the poems in Domestic Interior were written around the same time as Fiona Wright’s award-winning collection of essays Small Acts of Disappearance, and they share with that work her acute sensitivity to the details that build our everyday world, and hold us in thrall, in highly charged moments of emotional extremity.

Small Acts of Disappearance describes the author’s affliction with an eating disorder which begins in university, and escalates into life-threatening anorexia over the next ten years. Fiona Wright is a highly regarded poet and critic, and her account of her illness is informed by a keen sense of its contradictions and deceptions, and by an awareness of the empowering effects of hunger, which is unsparing in its consideration of the author’s motives and actions.

The poems in Knuckled are themselves bony and assertive, stripped down to the detail, which appeals in its physical quality and the manner in which it is offered, as much as in its compression of feeling. There is a strong sense of the social in Wright’s focus and selection: her details embody attitudes, prejudices, anxieties, identifications; they evoke the histories and mythologies embedded in family lore; and they carry an awareness of belonging in place.

The poems range from the flooded towns of the Snowy Mountains to the burnt-out landscape of Victoria to the holiday beaches of coastal NSW. One sequence is set in Sri Lanka, and compares the poet’s and her grandfather’s different experiences of Asia – other poems pursue this experience in Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. But it is the suburbs of Western Sydney, where the poet grew up and now works, that is her particular territory, with its mixture of voices and perspectives rendered all the more intensely for the fact that it is done with such a strict economy of means.