Commendations for The Walnut Tree

DAVID MASON, a former poet laureate of Colorado, author of Pacific Light, Sea Salt, The Sound, and a verse-novel, Ludlow:

'Real poetry involves not only a love of words, but also a vulnerability to life, an ability to feel its power. Tim Slade is a real poet who honours his island home with the sensitivity and sense of his attention. And he honours poetry by the acuteness of his reading, the depth of his vocation. The Walnut Tree is a fine debut, appealing to lovers of Tasmania, and to anyone interested in Australian poetry.'

 ROBERT ADAMSON ~ poet author of Reaching Light ~ Selected Poems.

'It's a terrific book!'

PETE HAY, poet author of Physick, Silently on the Tide, Last Days of the Mill and Forgotten Corners.   In the book I Shed My Skin ~ A Furneaux Islands Story, he contributed poems as part-collaborator with the author, Jane Giblin.

'To describe Tim as a poetic formalist is to do him an injustice.  He defies poetic pigeon-holing.  Much of his work is gloriously inventive, breaking free of all literary parameters.  Some of it is cut down and precise.  Some of it is expansive and intricate. There's a new world on every page, a surprise and delight on every page.  He is emotionally challenging, often humorous, sometimes delighted, sometimes sad but never maudlin, never piteous.  He looks out from his tin miners' cottage in Pioneer, and he sees a world of wonder ~ and he writes it.'

ESTHER OTTAWAY, poet author of Blood Universe, She Doesn't Seem Autistic, and Intimate, Low-Voiced, Delicate Things:  

'Tim Slade’s poems are finely honed in subtlety, rich in implications.  They are funny, and sad, and smart, and most of all, loving. These are poems of presence and of absence, of delight in people and places, of linguistic pleasure, by turns luminous and pragmatic. Often they come in portraits, sometimes strikingly spare with pristine enjambment; at other times they command form, tone, and sound-music, transcending these with delicate emotion. Tim’s is a true and strong voice in Australian poetry.'
 

JIM EVERETT-PURALIA MEENAMATTA, poet, playwright, film-maker, community elder:  

'Reading through Tim Slade’s poetry,  one finds a poet’s philosophy that like all philosophy brings even more questions. Tim has his poet’s ‘refuge’ in Pioneer, a small town in north-east Tasmania with a history of Aborigines, Chinese miners, and colonial development. He lives a life of the humble poet in a miner’s hut, with a wealth of local poetry sources, and understanding of a world that many never know. To me, Tim finds the inner-side of a place, person or event, he understands the natural world, what I call the All-life, and he has a unique way of presenting it in poems. His collection has a touch of reality for everyone, an inkling into how he, as a poet, sees the world around him. Enjoy the reading, lose yourself in Tim Slade’s poems, find his poet’s philosophy, I commend this art to all.'
 

KAREN KNIGHT, poet author of Postcards from the Asylum and Renovating Madness:  

'Tim Slade’s poetry has a refined and personal approach. The poems resonate both in thought and expression with a sustaining strength of quality, rewarding in their poetics.

In his tin-miner’s cottage, Tim writes believable and colourful poems relating to the beauty around him – family, friends, penny-farthings, postmen, tiger snakes, the last thylacine, wombats, the moon and Aussie icons – Clive James, the game of cricket, a Torana, gum leaf players and the Hills Hoist.

Tim has the ability to convey original insights in a sincere and refreshing way allowing the reader to explore some of what the poems may mean besides physical words on the page.

This poet has a certain shimmer to his writing and deserves to be read.'

GINA MERCER, poet author of Weaving Nests with Smoke and Stone:

'Tim Slade lives and writes in a remote part of Tasmania. And it shows in his work.  Isolation has allowed him to develop a highly distinctive and intriguing voice.  At times as elusive as the mist on a distant mountain range. I found I wanted to re-read each work, to immerse myself in that shimmer (as Karen Knight describes it), dwell a little longer with the intensity of this inner landscape.  Bright South have done us all a service in bringing this original and complex voice out of the shadows. And as a physical object it is a beautiful book to hold.'

SOMA MEI SHENG FRAZIER, Judge of the 2018 Margaret Reid International Poetry Prize:

About Tim Slade's Teacup of the Rose...  ''It's not every day that a poem of rhymed couplets, infused with traditional imagery and symbolism, intoxicates the modern reader. But the delicate heirloom Teacup of the Rose serves up aroma and alchemy; triggers recognition, memory, connection. Here is a rich blend of new flavors and old knowledge—steeped in grief, sweetened with tenderness.' 

Poetic Influences: 

George Mackay Brown, Sarah Day, Clive James, David Malouf, Les Murray, Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Karen Knight, Jim Everett - puralia meenamatta, Seamus Heaney, Esther Ottaway, Andy Jackson, Tim Thorne, Tim Rogers, Molly Guy, Tim Winton, Edward Lear, W.H. Auden. Margaret Scott, Dolores O'Riordan, David Mason.