Borrowing from the title of his Bruce Dawe prize-winning poem, Steve Armstrong's wonderful first collection is 'a cracked and weathered prayer'. These are questing, generous poems, filled with grace and vulnerability, and reading them is like taking a walk through a magical and yet familiar landscape, a walk haunted by memory, grief, longing and hope. Highly recommended. Lisa Brockwell

The intimate territory Armstrong walks attends to the wider world-in particular, wild country, forest and field, river and ridge. But also the suburbs, the kitchen, the realms of the everyday. He writes the places in themselves, and he writes them as analogues, metaphors, for the geographies of the self. His is a poetry of landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss. Of delight and dilemma. He is a diviner. From the broken ground he draws the sacred. Mark Tredinnick