(David McCooey, Australian poet and critic, on The Fabled Third and its predecessors. (Email correspondence, published here with his kind permission.)

‘I love the sense of mood in all of your work. I love, too, your skill with, and attention to, the sonic condition of poetry (not something often talked about these days). Like this:

A dappled grey horse, huge,
its rider dressed for the hunt,
in fawn-coloured clothes,
horn slung around his neck,
watching him from the trees.
A bent note in the rustle of the forest.

What superb vowel music. And then there is, of course, your historical imagination. I love moments like the footnote on ‘gebedda’. Your skill with narrative and image is often, to use a hackneyed term, cinematic. (I’m thinking especially of when you start and end a scene.) And lastly, though not finally, as a work of intertextuality, I am in awe of the knowledge and adaptation skills evident in your trilogy.

Congratulations on the trilogy; it’s an extraordinary achievement.’

( David’s most recent collection The Book of Falling, is published by Upswell Poetry. He is also Professor of literature and writing at Deakin University.)