Rosanna Licari and Stephanie Green at the launch of Seams of Repair

Seams of Repair by Stephanie Green, Calanthe Press 2023, was launched by Rosanna Licari at the Zamia Theatre, Tamborine Mountain, hosted by Under the Greenwood Tree Bookshop and Art Gallery, on 17 November 2023

Welcome to this latest Calanthe Press celebration. It’s lovely to see you all here at the launch of Seams of Repair by Stephanie Green. I acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which we are situated, the Wangerriburra and Yugembeh people, and thank the Calanthe Collective for hosting this event.

Stephanie Green is a versatile and accomplished writer. Not only has she published criticism, screen studies and biography as a university lecturer, she has also written in various genres such as poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction and travel essays in literary magazines, anthologies and journals, most recently in Live Encounters, StylusLit, Axon, Meniscus and Queensland Review. Her books in the literary milieu include Breathing in Stormy Seasons, a volume of prose poems, with Recent Work Press in 2019, and selected short stories, Too Much too Soon, with Pandanus Press in 2006.

Stephanie was born in Papua New Guinea, grew up in Melbourne and lived for over a decade in both Canberra and Perth, before settling in Queensland, with her partner, Ian, in 2008. She retired from Griffith University in 2021 with the aim, among other things, of writing more poetry.

In the foreword, Stephanie states that the idea for Seams of Repair was taken from the art of ceramic repair known as ‘golden mending’ (also called Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi) – traditionally practised in Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam – where gold-coloured lacquer is used to mend broken pottery, and even glass. It comes from a philosophy where breakages are seen as an object’s story or existence, contributing to its beauty and value, but also acceptance of imperfection as part of our daily lives.

Seams of Repair includes poems written in free verse as well as prose poems written without line breaks, yet still using poetic devices. In his review of Stephanie’s previous collection, Australian poet Phillip Hall noted ‘a delightful self-referential humour’. Seams of Repair also contains glimpses of wry humour, however, serious it is in its reflections.

Poet and literary editor, Paul Munden, says of the new collection, ‘With a deft metaphorical touch, Stephanie Green has crafted … vibrant poetry that is equally a work of philosophy’.

Oz Hardwick, writer and musician as well as Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University, remarks ‘Stephanie Green’s precise poems delineate the intensely personal moments which, paradoxically, we all share. The work here collects fragments of the vital yet frequently unnoticed – “home spun, if you like” – and, through the near-magical art of Kintsukuroi, fuses them with gold into a whole’.

One could compare writers to ceramicists and glassblowers, writers are, in a sense, makers. Here, Stephanie also extends the metaphor of ‘golden mending’ to explore how the mended fractures of human experience transforms our writing in valuable ways.

As Professor Emeritus Paul Hetherington states, this is ‘a joyous, sometimes salutary volume that touchingly joins memory and intimacy. These are nuanced poems in which the fractures of experience are exquisitely sutured by words’.

Stephanie has worked closely with Calanthe Press editors, to realise this collection. The Press has now established a reputation as a fine Queensland publisher of poetry with a distinctive list that reflects its North Tamborine home and the community that supports it.

Congratulations to Stephanie and everyone involved in Calanthe Press on this wonderful collection.

 – Rosanna Licari

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Rosanna E. Licari is the poetry editor of online literary journal, StylusLit, and her poetry has appeared in national and international journals. Her latest collection Earlier (Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, 2023) is available from the publisher or your favourite bookseller, and digital copies are available at ebooks.com and other online platforms.

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Seams of Repair by Stephanie Green is available from  https://www.calanthepress.com.au/shop/p/land-art-stuart-cooke-zfchg

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