If Grief were a bird

Elizabeth Barton

‘Elizabeth Barton has a unique voice – rooted in her love for the land, the earth, and also for her family and the father she has lost. The poems in this pamphlet are carefully crafted, and the beauty of the language, and the rare image or turn of phrase, make a music very like a song ‘rich as honeycomb’, or like a bird that is singing of the world – a world of searing grief and loss and pain, but also of ‘jasmine flowers’ and a sublime ‘iridescence’.  It is through nature that she has found the words to articulate her grief over her father’s death, and to make sorrow a way of singing and an art.  Barton sings from the whole heart.’

--A A Marcoff

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