The inconsolable clock

In this book, you hold time and truth in your hands: this is how I understand Andrea Demetriou's beautiful and moving poetry. Her words and her silences -for like all true poets, Demetriou understands the dignity and profound power of the pause- take us from a Cyprus shattered and divided by the horror of war and occupation, to an evocation of the sights and sounds of inner-city Melbourne streets and then they return us to the eastern Mediterranean to where another form of war, an economic war, again shatters and divides. In her poems, it is as if time and memory run through our fingers; we try and catch them but as is their nature, they slip away, fall to the ground. But they don't disappear; they nourish the earth, they leave their mark on our hands and we bring our fingers to our lips and we are refreshed. That's what every poem in this book is: a kiss, welcome and needed, on our lips. Each poem is a trace of time, of memory, of love, of friendship, of rage, of remembering, of forgetting, of a night in celebration and of a day in mourning.