Kathryn Lomer – August 20 2017

Brain Injury Awareness Week (Brain Injury Australia) – August 21-27 2017

Kathryn is an award-winning novelist, young adult author, short story writer and poet. She has also written a short screen film. Kathryn left school at 15 and attended university as a mature age student gaining a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Graduate Diploma in Journalism, Media and Communications. She taught English as a Second Language for many years in Australia and Japan. Kathryn’s other poetry collections include Two Kinds of Silence, and An Ear on my Heart featuring poetry on pregnancy and parenthood by Kathryn and fellow Tasmanian poet, Esther Ottaway. Kathryn’s other works include the novel The God in the Ink, the collection of fiction Camera Obscura and young adult novels What now, Tilda B?, The Spare Room, and Talk Under Water which explores language and communication through Summer, a girl who is deaf – an appropriate read this week, as it also Hearing Awareness Week. Kathryn currently lives in Hobart and works at the Museum of Old and New Art, better known as MONA.

Extraction of Arrows
University of Queensland Press, 2003; ISBN 9780702233715
“[Kathryn’s] first collection of poetry is arranged in three, untitled, parts. Part 1 features poems with a focus on love and loss, both on a personal, interpersonal and collective level. Part 2 is introspective with poems about gestation in a biological, relational and creative sense. Part 3 focusses on poems of discovery and clarity …. ‘Ifs & Ands’ is about an awful accident that leaves a young boy with brain damage and a family forever altered… “A different boy becomes your son and you watch him learn things you watched thirteen years ago; he is building alternative paths for thought”. This poet is fearless in exploring dreadful, as well as glorious, events with attention and grace. Read this collection and you will be rewarded.” – Pippi, Readers in the Mist

Night Writing
University of Queensland Press, 2014; ISBN 9780702250
With sensual, fresh and graceful energies, Kathryn Lomer’s Night Writing is a collection that moves between the grounded and the whimsical. Each small gesture has expansive implications; each poem is jewelled with reflections and woven with slivers of insight and bright fragments of mirth. Night Writing is divided into five sections: The mother hand, Rainbow angle, The dark zone, Eclipse plumage and Holy days. The inspirations for these poems have been drawn from landscape (including some beautiful evocations of Tasmania), craft and creativity, motherhood, love and resilience.