The tantalising title of Rita Tognini’s collection points to a poet exploring many questions about Australia and her place in it. The poems provide an intricate search for the subtleties of personal identity, stretched between her birth country of Italy with its wealth of family connections and memories, and modern Western Australia which has long become more than ‘the land of upside down’. This process is complicated but enriched by the thinking of a person for whom language is not just a means of communication but something in which she lives, as elemental as the weather. Italian and English help determine the way she experiences both inner life and the outside world, and give her a point
of subtlety from which to view subjects as diverse as Emily Dickinson, scientific thought, the animal world, and Aboriginal culture.
Almost Like Home is a poised collection of intelligence, sensory vivacity and ongoing curiosity.
Dennis Haskell
Emeritus Professor
Poet and Literary Essayist
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Almost Like Home illuminates that when we change homelands, we expand identity and perspective, ways of understanding both the self and the world, become someone new. At the same time, we are left vulnerable in our understanding of personal identity, and are led to question how changing place and language affects the way we feel, think, be: ‘see the bones/ of our discarded speech/ shining in moonlight/ follow them/ back into the home/ of our mother tongue’
A rediscovery of ancestors reminds of who we once were, as well as our connection to place as a means of belonging—including our new home. Epiphanies come in the metaphorical, in traffic, ‘I’m bad at merging…if it’s my fate/ never to merge’, but then in the garden, ‘I grow where you confine me/ my spikes unfolding as a fan’. An intelligent, empathic and astutely composed collection.
Shey Marque
Poet
Almost Like Home – Australia
Includes postage within Australia
A$30.00
Almost Like Home – International
For all international purchases. Includes postage to the world
A$40.00