Body Language

Winner of the 2012 Anne Elder Award for Best First Collection of Australian Poetry. Body Language is a strong debut collection from an exciting new voice in Australian poetry. Allen writes about everyday experiences - doing a crossword, studying a bunch of flowers, watching a bird out the window - as they are refracted through the prism of the poet's mind with all its obsessions, anxieties and peculiar sensitivities. She writes about grief and how we repeatedly make sense of absence, with moving accuracy. Her poetry is also mindful and grounded in the body: we are reminded of the feeling of skin against freshly laundered sheets, the taste of honey, the sound of cicadas. These poems take us from Sydney to Italy, from the psychiatrist's office to the hairdresser's. There is sex and love and friendship and even Kate Moss makes an appearance. Allen is a poet worth reading. Elizabeth Allen is a poet who impresses with her ability to gain meaning from the most subtle contingencies of life. Sensitive, understated and intense, lyrical but grounded, this is a strong and assured collection. Adam Aitken The poems in Elizabeth Allen's Body Language explore notions of identity and selfhood inflected by the knowledge and reality of death, that great leveller. They are also meditations on loss and acceptance, the joys of daily life. I am impressed by the risks she takes-being true to the experience but, most importantly, remaining true to the materiality of the poem itself. Quietly, and in her own time, Allen has become a poet, a poet of the body but also of the heart. Nicolette Stasko

About Elizabeth Allen