The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Light We Cannot See by Anne Casey

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Kirsten Kowalewski, is from The Light We Cannot See by Anne Casey, released by Salmon Poetry in 2021.

Where gulls cry

I could tell you how the whole earth seems to end
at this one place where the land falls
cleanly into a tumultuous thundering—
the relentless roar of furious millennia crashing
iced cobalt against three hundred million years
of vertical bituminous siltstone stubbornness,
all overlaid with a violence of vivid greenness
inconceivable until witnessed, where the sky splits
open above—brewing caliginous charcoal yielding
to an inevitability of iridescence, streaming
shards spearing simmering drizzle-laden mists,
all lit as if from within with an otherworldly luminosity
approximating divinity, a scene so sharp yet ethereal,
surreal, imprinted in a part of self within but apart
that might burst from this pulsing bone-suit, this
shadow-world flesh-mantle sheerly in the act
of reliving that reminiscence. I could tell you
all of that or I could say how much this exiled

soul aches for home.

Originally from the west of Ireland and living in Sydney, Anne Casey is author of five poetry collections. A journalist and legal author for 30 years, her work is widely published internationally, ranking in The Irish Times‘ Most Read. Anne has won literary awards in Ireland, Australia, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong and the USA, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and the Henry Lawson Prize 2022. She is the recipient of an Australian Government scholarship and a bursary for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney where she researches and teaches.

Kirsten Kowalewski is the editor for online horror fiction review resource Monster Librarian. She has an MLS and a specialist certificate in school library media from Indiana University, has worked as a children’s librarian and elementary school media specialist, and is a lifelong reader.