A new beginning

Kwame Senu Neville Dawes

"When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016, it was seen as doing something quite new: two poets recognised as being at the top of their game in, respectively, Australian and Caribbean poetry, had risked, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily "structure of call-and-response, each utterance...filtered through the other". Karen McCarthy Wolf noted in Speak from Here to There, a "warmth...in the correspondence...between a black man almost but not quite marooned in the white of America's Midwest, and a white man negotiating his own exile from the vast physical and historical dissonance of Western Australia". In A New Beginning that initial dialogue is taken to new depths of trust, exposure and intimacy, to new themes and concerns. Dawes' and Kinsella's voices are utterly distinctive, but one also hears new notes as they respond to each other's investigations of the craft...