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About the author
HELEN SWAIN lives and works in lutruwita/Tasmania. She has been a teacher, performer, and community arts worker and currently works as a poet in residence with Inscape Arts, an organisation set up to enrich experiences of people receiving health care within the public system. She has previously published two poetry books and read and performed her poems throughout Tasmania.
About the book
CALIBRATING HOME considers how home, twists and turns in its meanings, from a place of deep content to a place of loss, from nostalgia in full bloom, to harsh reality. This is done in unexpected ways, ranging from our relationship with spiders, mattresses in the street, who we meet at bus stops, living in aged-care homes and by endorsing taps. Calibrating Home takes us to the kitchen sink, the garden, to distant shorelines and many places between. The language of the poems is idiosyncratic yet completely ordinary, lucid yet lyrical, questioning the expected norm of home and calibrating its deviations.
Cover Image: Detail from Untitled, by Suzi Tyson
There is a wild freedom and fierce precision in the poetry of Helen Swain. Witty, inciteful, playful and deeply serious, her voice reaches into places few of her contemporaries venture: matters of the heart, family, social justice, the undercurrents of political turmoil, the refugee experience. All these are handled with a deft subtlety and placed against the backdrop of a keen observation of everyday life that jolts the reader into looking again. These poems are refreshing and worthy of being read widely beyond the shores of their Tasmanian moorings.
Anne Kellas 2023
Rich with empathy and tenderness, Calibrating Home moves between deep time “from before and before,” and contemporary life. Light and lightness coexist with shadows; joy and laughter interweave with loss and grief. Shining through the collection is the certainty expressed in the lines: ‘somehow/ I still know deeply, about the goodness of people’. These poems celebrate that goodness and are infused with gratitude for it. They speak for the displaced, the disempowered, the down and out, and for women’s work, their art, their challenges, their sorrows and delights. These are poems of connection that will open your mind and move your heart. You will want to read them again and again.
Lyn Reeves 2024