Unlikely Vessels – Pamela Leach
Unlikely Vessels
Unlikely Vessels is a weighty debut poetry collection that does more than cast out anchors, more than intentionally trace the lands, waterways and liminal zones that are Tasmania. Indeed, the poet drills up core samples, plays out words that swell with the powers of nature and imagination, displays a love of the grit of Tasmanian soil and the frigid truths of its flotsam and lore. Containing more than 80 poems in eight sections, Pamela Leach's collection funnels national and global threads into an unmistakable, deeply grained Tasmanian artefact. Pamela demonstrates the range of her poetic familiarity in a seasoned voice and with an immigrant's passionate ear for her chosen island state. Readers encounter history and song, imprints and echoes of convicts, First Peoples, visitors, settlers, and migrants old and recent. This eminently readable collection offers an opportunity for broad engagement and detailed scrutiny, easily inviting readers into the poetry genre and tempting us to risk a deeper dive. Losses and wins are scored literally and figuratively, engaging diasporic and surprising metaphors for human experience. Yet the poet sails close to the wind, reeling readers in and in for more.
About the author
Pamela Leach PhD is a Canadian-born Australian and Tasmaniophile who turned to poetry and became prize-winning soon after the onset of disability. Pamela enjoyed an academic career in political studies and human rights. Her work “pulses with sonic power and a questing sense of the journey that is life” (Esther Ottaway). Unlikely Vessels, Leach's debut volume, opens “the undreamt, unborn horizon, the smack of ocean beneath this brilliant collection, and in Pamela Leach a strong new voice beside us to navigate the thrilling risk of this voyage within” (Mark Macleod, PhD). Pamela has been published in anthologies such as FourW, and journals including Island, Quadrant, Bramble, and Forty South Tasmania. Her poetry radiates imagery, humour, compassion and irony, reflecting a laminate of life experiences that have included volunteer social work in African prisons, tour guiding in Europe, crewing on square-rigged ships and wilderness canoe-tripping.