Edging Them Out

Hermina Burns' fifth collection of poems, Edging them out, foregrounds insufficiently famous women.

The critic Jennifer Gribble writes of the collection: 'A gathering of brilliant women is celebrated, from Julia Zenobia, Roman Queen, to the 98-year-old woman rising, salty and cold and strong, out of the waves in Western Port Bay, ‘more glorious than any Venus ever painted.’ 

There is indigenous enslaved Wauba, valiantly rescuing her drowning captors. Here is Fanny Burney, writer, having her cancerous breast cut off without anaesthetic. Here is Ellen Kelly, mother of Ned, and Louisa Lawson, discovering that son Henry whose work she was the first to publish, is cross because, in a killer couplet: ‘she was something other/than just his mother.’