Tannic Skin & Sweet Flesh
POEMS
Linda Godfrey
Publication date
ISBN:
June
2026
978-1-923248-26-7
About the author
LINDA GODFREY is a poet, writer and editor living on Wadi Wadi land, in Wollongong, NSW. She has a Masters of Professional Writing from UTS, Sydney. She has published poetry and short stories in anthologies and online.
Linda was the Program Manager of the Wollongong Writers Festival, from 2015 to 2018. She was a fiction reader for Overland and was the online fiction editor for Overland Autumn 2018, and has been the recipient of a Varuna Residency and an Australian Society of Authors mentorship. Linda has edited three award-winning books, including one Miles Franklin winner and she has taught writing: both short stories and poetry.
Verity La published her chapbook of poetry, Count the Ways, in 2021. Also in 2021, Linda was awarded the AAWP’s Chapter One: pathway to publication for the first chapter of a novel.
Linda loves a prose poem, is an avid reader, and her sense of humour tends to the absurd. An ancient history tragic, her ambition is to live on the beach at Agia Triada in Crete where the Minoans built a summer palace.
About the book
Linda Godfrey is one of Australia’s finest practitioners of the short form. InTannic Skin & Sweet Flesh she explores how "modern poetry is all about the small incidents from a day", relocating the small and quotidian from the margins to the centre." Linda Godfrey offers a cornucopia of lush, tactile and sensual tastes and images", says Dael Allison, "from landscapes 'all pale stones and poetry' to the intimacy of the bedroom where 'Eros has loosened my limbs, a breeze ruffles linen sheets and curtains', and the kitchen, where the act of preparing and cooking food is as erotic as sex ... The experience offered in this richly rewarding volume is earthy and lived."
A cornucopia of experiences—not so much a Travelogue as a Lindalogue. Her poetic and perceptive eye moves from vividly expressed experiences in various countries—to Australian adventures or life— to personal, family or cultural presences, which she articulates through a rich and tannic alertness.
—JOANNE BURNS
A sumptuous collection of poetic vignettes, drifting through landscapes of memory, culture, and desire. Godfrey seduces with lush, sensory-rich portraits alive with whimsy, romance, and the beautiful chaos of experience. At its heart, this is a collection that charts the shifting terrain of culture, place, and inheritance: a mosaic of the alluring, haunting, beautiful, and bizarre. Fasten your seatbelt—you will not return untouched.
—PARIS ROSEMONT
Linda Godfrey blends and mashes language to release the aromas, the oils, the flavours. There’s always something familiar, something elusive, and much to relish in her poetry.
— ALI JANE SMITH
This collection has the immediacy of swimming in the Aegean, here we are in a languorous immersion of words, where by sleight of hand history and a panoply of finely observed life and invented detail give the reader a literary buoyancy, so they are both in the moment and savouring the totality of what went before. Add to this Godfrey’s magpie’s eye for absurd details, her talent for dialogue, and you have
a satisfyingly delicious collection of poems.
—CAROL JENKINS