Gum Tree Burning

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The appeal in Pascoe is not just its slippery ambiguities of language but a kind of challenge that he puts to himself, where he explores the borders of his compassion, his temptation to malice and his pathos. They are all in confessional contention, as with his fine portrait of his own ilk in The quiet us, which tells of the enormous white middle class and its provisional progressiveness, its modesty and sanctimony, undoubtedly its underlying goodness, the same kind of virtue that makes us weep for cattle who are left to die in a flood. The balance between irony and genuine emotion in the poems is in itself touching and it reminds me that this practice of reconciling ourselves to the tragicomedy of life is very hard to do without poetry.

Robert Nelson, May 2019