The Owl Inside

The Owl Inside presents an often haunted and feral, sometimes confessional and domesticated enquiry into what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. These poems are suffused with musings on the escape to outer space, secret communications between trees, the movements of birds, suburban trampolines, motherhood, midnight wanderings, the climate crisis, motorbikes, affairs, bushfires, and barbie dolls. Yet, in all this, lies a quest for what can be found just beyond the material, heading towards the numinous.

Throughout these poems, Ivy Ireland examines tendencies toward pushing together and breaking apart; from the deeply human and personal towards the more expansive and cosmic.

The Owl Inside dictates everyday encounters with alterity, as if Jack Spicer was a single mum shacked up on the shores of Lake Macquarie, distilling a language of the alien self. Ireland's collection is a paean to pent-up frustrations and anxieties, absolved by a humble heuristics of living. Her muse: bin night. - Keri Glastonbury

This is a poetry all at once sensuous, moving, strange and familiar. The language springs gazelle-like from original thought to thought as the poet pulls apart our modes of perception then finds luminous ways to put them together again. - Judy Johnson