A woman on the verge of a breakdown begins to hear the voice of a mediaeval mystic. The convict wife of an Australian settler faces the bloody price of colonisation. A man murders his wife and flees to a country town. A girl is visited by a vampire and uncovers her hidden past.

In these four hallucinatory texts for theatre, written over the past two decades, the past is never dead: its violence reaches into the fractured present. Croggon’s characters struggle through a world alienated by trauma. Some find their truths: others remain lost. Disturbing, ecstatic, ambiguous, affirming, these poems for the stage unpick the seams of reality, opening the dark places of memory.

Alison Croggon’s work encompasses poetry, novels, criticism and texts for performance. She has had sixteen works produced in Australia, both libretti and plays. They include The Riders, winner of the Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards, and Mayakovsky, shortlisted for the drama prize in the 2015 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards. Her award-winning novels and collections of poetry have been widely published in the US, UK and Europe as well as in Australia. She was named 2009 Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year and her selected critical essays, Remembered Presences, was recently published by Currency Press.