Raw Salt

Izzy Roberts-Orr's debut collection Raw Salt explores contemporary elegy and writing the environment-excavating and engaging death and its aftermath, lineages both ancestral and intellectual. Responding to the sudden death of Roberts-Orr's father a decade ago, Raw Salt is a work of mourning and memory, healing and consilience. The collection is raw with lived experience, the complex history and inheritance we each receive with the death of a parent. The ongoing presence of her father, a horticulturalist, shines through Roberts-Orr's deep attention to the natural world, rendered in poems of extraordinary clarity and precision, offering a kind of healing we might all attend. A complex and deeply human work, this debut collection explores with nuance and generosity the darker undercurrents, the cycles of growth, decay and destruction, sustaining us and the ecosystems from which we have evolved and, as with the departed, are always a part. Izzy Roberts-Orr's Raw Salt introduces a remarkable new voice to Australian poetry.

The work of Raw Salt is attentive to the flow and forms of mourning. These poems sit with what keeps us from sleep as they score the music of endurance. These are achy, tender, formally expansive poems that set out from a child's loss of her father to situate human loss and gain amidst the more-than-human world. Raw Salt is remarkable for its range, courage, raillery and vitality. Felicity Plunkett