Riverbed Sky Songs

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. 

In a note, Tais Rose Wae describes the way the poems ‘arose upon stilling myself beside riverbeds and varying tides as I returned home to myself’. Wae is a weaver as well as a poet, and the work of Riverbed Sky Songs serves to enact a resilient connection to her Aboriginal ancestry, despite the weight of losses sustained by her family. As the poems traverse landscape and change, they collect threads of inheritance, dream and memory. They are at once profoundly introspective and reflective, and generously porous, welcoming the reader to attend this journey alongside Wae. Written in the time before her son’s birth and during his first year, they are poems witnessing, as Wae says in a note, ‘the incredible act of endless renewal and sacrifice’, one of transformation and expansion, a revision of self in place and time. Riverbed Sky Songs is a work of humility and patience with the uncertain, the unknown and the ineffable, ‘words / I cannot pronounce but haven’t forgotten’. This is a work about disconnection and loss resulting from displacement. Its formal porousness suggests the silences and losses the poet navigates, while seeking repair for the sake of the next generation, beginning with her son. It is an extraordinary book that unfolds for the reader as an immersive journey and generous vision. Moving through many forms, these are poems of unabashed grace and openness, reckoning, wisdom, and resilience.