Beneath the Tree Line

Jane Gibian's poetry is remarkable for its clarity of perception and its sensitivity to the details and rhythms of life — whether in nature or in social routines. The poetry's engagement is first and foremost with the natural environment, and with the contrast between the human engagement — with its extremes of fascination and despair — and the natural world itself, disinterested and unforgiving. The landscapes range from the coast to the forest, from rivers in urban settings to country towns and their surroundings. Their beauty is felt alongside their vulnerability to degradation.

Throughout there is the awareness of connectedness, between people, places, seasons, animate and inanimate things — and the power of language to celebrate these connections, to register joy and constraint, and to draw on different kinds of reality. Later in the collection, Gibian's poetry focuses on the passage of time and its vagaries, the ancient cycles of nature, the threat of change, personal histories, the fleeting moments of awareness captured in poems.

A poet whose work seems full of grace and luminous vision. - Judith Beveridge

Sensuous, beautifully tactile and alive, these poems glitter with the world around us in all its fragility, damage and wonder. - Peter Boyle