The Belburd is a story of The Dreaming and of dreaming, of creation and of motherhood. Nardi Simpson weaves together two threads of experience: the story of Ginny, a blak poet recovering from loss, who is trying to contend with poetry, publishing, storytelling and tradition; and, second, of being and non-being, the experiences from before you’re born and after you die. Here, Simpson’s focus is both universal and localised, considering the infinite nature of being, both within and outside a human life.

Despite this metaphysicality, The Belburd is deeply grounded, deeply relatable. Ginny lives on Gadigal land, a familiar landscape with familiar people. She goes to poetry readings and is affronted by university students who tell her to post the event on social media for likes, she goes to garage sales and meets her neighbours for the first time after years of living next to each other, she goes to her local café and simplifies her name for the barista.

The other being, whom we know as ‘Sprite’ and as ‘Splat’ and a series of other names, also has universal experiences, even if they are not ones we remember – Sprite waits with the ‘Eel mother’ to be conceived, then spends months in their mother’s uterus imagining what it will be like to be born. Both Sprite and Ginny are trying to become people, become themselves, unbecome the parts of themselves they do not like.

With a lyrical mastery only further cultivated since her debut, Song of the Crocodile, Simpson finds the sublime in the quotidian, elevating experiences (as base as being born or dying, as complex as grief or motherhood) to an art form. She shows that life is a series of becomings, experienced by humans and animals and the world alike – we all become together.