The Tiny Museums

Highly Commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript

‘Carolyn Abbs’s poems in her poised collection The Tiny Museums live in the gap between deep time and now. They are insistently alive to the rich tensions between those two registers. This pairing of past/present plays out in other unifying doublings and mirrorings, particularly those between the UK and Western Australia, between photography and poetry, and a fertile creative relationship shared by sisters. Abbs deftly creates the world of her book through a phenomenological approach. Elegant layers of textures, colours, sounds and movement invite the reader into an experiential sense of this trench between the past and the present. In this way, her sensibility is painterly but it’s a Northern light in her poems reminiscent of the crisp mysteries of a Vermeer. Abbs’s poems dealing with family grief are the centrepieces of the book and are admirable in their ability to move the reader without any cloying sentimentality. Along with a skilled attentiveness to the ways in which sound moves through a line, this beautifully modulated emotional intelligence is a very great strength of her poetry.’

The 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award judges’ report