Whimsy and from the heart, Libby Goodsir’s words reflect what is to be human and to be a mother. Madeleine’s images perfectly counterpoint Libby’s words, adding a thousand new dimensions to the meditation. What a gift! - Chris Gallagher

A collection of ‘images and words playing with what it is to be human / they asked to be put together’. Blue Pollen Beautiful is the result of a serendipitous collaboration between mother and daughter. Overruling a daughter’s ‘decisive and unsentimental’ intention to discard earlier artwork, her mother rescues the images and strategically places them among her own gentle, meditative poems. The result is a lovely distillation of women’s lived experience, of ‘the shuffle of women / making more space’. The poems celebrate the various selves the poet encounters within and without as she explores the ‘beauties of change’ and traces the flow of life from generation to generation, like ‘seagrasses / borne up by each wave’. Blue Pollen Beautiful honours both the flow and the ‘anchored / lucid’ -mothers and daughters as givers and keepers of story. - Terry Whitebeach