I feel very proud to have two reviews in the latest edition of SWW Women’s Ink Magazine, Spring- Summer November 2025.
Thank you Janette Conway for your very professional edition of our Women’s Ink.
Jan does it all joyfully and with comfort and ease. It shows that it is a labour of love
but it still is very demanding on time and energy and I appreciate this.
A final wonderful edition for our Centenary Year.
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On Wonder
Vanessa Proctor
reviewed by Colleen Keating
This striking new book is filled with wonder, a delight to read either from cover to cover
or to dip into poem by poem. Full of original images it begins with family, unfolds from autobiographical
to the rich cacophony of visual arts, music, architecture, many as ekphrastic poems
and others using the powerful technique of taking on the persona such as a medieval gargoyle
in the poem Le Stryge .
I believe awe and wonder can sustain us; how taking time for awareness of the beauty
around us helps us and especially our children to grow in spirit.
At this time of increasing conflict and fraught demands on our attention, how uplifting it is to read
this collection of contemplative poetry.
On Wonder, a first collection of free verse from Vanessa Proctor, was published by Walleah Press
in late December 2024.
Vanessa is an award–winning Sydney poet and is highly acclaimed as a haikuist with three haiku
publications and co-editor of under the same moon, Fourth Australian Haiku Anthology .
Vanessa Proctor’s poetry “encompasses an intimacy of living with minutely observed details of nature and time”.
These affirming words by Marcelle Freiman, on the back cover, come from an appreciation of the rich use of imagery
and memory where time is all present.
Each poem is a bead of beauty, of lightness, of memory as in the wistful Cicada shells, their song,
thick with promise
of long afternoons
and lingering summers/which inevitability end
far too soon.
Vanessa writes gently of tragedy, a friend dying, a shipwreck, the desperation in Budapest 1944
where the pen is power.
Memory as a way of living with the present and the telling of stories is succinctly expressed in Vanessa’s early poems;
sharing a bowl of steaming pho with her son, times with her father as a young girl , with her mother in Weberg 1980
and its hint of unease, with her sister
in a carefree summer spilling over
with sunshine and salt spray;
with her daughter,a poem any of us who have had a teenaged daughter will identify with.
One of my favourites is the poignant poem, Emergence about a new baby in the special care nursery,
Soon I’ll take you home
hold you,
get to know you,
from the outside in.
Vanessa writes of an experience in an English cathedral, with the singing of a Hildegard of Bingen song,
O Quam Mirabilis Est
(How Wondrous it is) we are touched with an abundance of spirit, carried across nine centuries
in praise of the beauty of creation,
the transformation of breath
into the energy of sound,
one expansive voice rising up,
visionary and numinous.
We were privileged to hear Vanessa talk about her new book at our SWW August meeting
and I hope this review encourages you to enjoy On Wonder. As in her poem Dragonfly,
may your reading her poetry,
“become a stillness
that dissolves into the morning ‘
