Alight on all things precious by Sarah Rice, Liquid Amber Press 2026, was launched by Emilie Collyer at the Library at the Dock, Docklands, Victoria on Sunday 22 February 2026.

Alight on all things precious.

Meaning: to pause on them, land on them lightly.

Meaning: to shine a light on them, illuminate them.

Meaning: to set something on fire.

The multiple meanings of the title of Sarah’s beautiful collection introduces us to how playful and clever with language this book is, and also how every poem has multiple strands and potential interpretations. Each image or artwork and its accompanying words are doing a large amount of work for such lightness. Reminding us to always look again, to feel for unusual connections, to slow down, to let otherness be present. Each poem, each moment awakens newness within us.

Ekphrastic writing has many definitions and interpretations. I like the etymology of the word: combining the prefix ex- (‘out’) with the verb ‘phrazein’ (‘to point out or explain’). In rhetoric handbooks from as early as the 1^st Century, it was defined as a descriptive speech that brings the thing shown vividly before the eyes’ (Goldhill 2007: 3). Ekphrasis was the practice of ‘enargeia – the ability to make visible’ and as such was ‘one of the orator’s most important weapons of persuasion’.

In contemporary context it has less of an oratorial role and evolved to common and straightforward understandings such as Spitzer’s: ‘the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art’ (quoted in Webb 1999: 10). I like more stretchy analyses such as Genevieve Kaplan’s (2009) assertion that ekphrastic poems move beyond description to ‘share how the artwork makes the speaker feel or what it reminds the speaker of’ (Kaplan 2009: 3). Cassandra Atherton who writes that ‘ekphrastic poetry has an important function in asking the reader–viewer to ‘see’ and think again; to consider what art knows and what ‘reality’ may be’ (Atherton and Hetherington 2023: 95). And my favourite of all: Cole Swensen’s (2011) take that ekphrasis is: ‘a ‘side-by-side, a walking-along-with’ and that artwork and poem ‘are fellow travelers sharing a context’ (Swensen 2011: 70, italics in original).

 

Spending time with Sarah’s collection weaves and walks through many of these definitions and of course expands beyond and outward from them as well. These are not poems for tying down. They are for slipping between, for what is not said or shown as much as what is, and for listening as much as looking.

The collection is delivered in four sections, the first titled Alight. ‘In passing (after Hammershoi)’ plays, as with the collection’s title, with themes of double meaning (to pass through, to die, to think of something briefly), as well as with themes of light and shadow, love and grief. Silence is also a key quality in this and many other works in the collection as the painting and the words invite contemplation: what is not being said? What can only be shown or felt? Language is a risk in these moments as it can intrude but Sarah’s poems don’t intrude they offer an alternative to the silence or another way of hearing it. Consider these few lines:

The remembered child dancing through the room

And finally:

not so much as a whisper of disturbance Unless of course you count the dust Awakened in her wake.

Such beautiful use of assonance, of soft sounds to evoke this sense of life and loss.

Throughout the collection there are threads that weave between poems and sections. These final lines about dust speak so clearly to one of the final sequences of the book: ‘The Dust Archive’ and ‘The Dust Intervention’s both after Hannah Bertram.

Where the after Hammershoi poems respond to an artwork by a long-gone artist, much of the book is built from responses and collaborations with contemporary artists.

‘On the mountain’ – a collaboration with ceramicist Patsy Healy – has such a strong sense of how two artists connect with each other via place and how each artform informs and bounces off the other. Ceramics feel earthy as objects and yet the images we see here are of tiny landscape paintings, quite delicate to look at. The language of Sarah’s poetry grounds them in earth and walking and smells of trees:

the twisting track of twisting trees that corkscrew their way out of density obeying some unseen centrifugal force in their winding dance

The close rhymes here add to a sense of movement and of something epic, beyond the everyday.

The poem ‘Vitreous syneresis’ a letterpress, photography, poetry collaboration between Caren Florence and Sarah brings to mind this quote from Natalie Diaz:

 In some moments, letters become an extension of my physical body: when I am writing them, or thinking them, or when I am pressing my eyes over their dark bodies on the page. A page, like a letter, has a sound. It speaks. It moves.

(Diaz 2021: np)

In the second section titled Appeal, Sarah extends this interplay between object, body, artwork and physicality in her deeply respectful and moving response to Myuran Sukumaran’s exhibition Another Day in Paradise. Myuran was one of the Bali Nine and he was executed by firing squad in 2015. These extraordinary self-portraits resonate with power and sorrow and Sarah finds a way to speak of and through them:

I ask that my paintings walk out with me into the sunshine Into the waiting space

My executioners cannot face the myriad faces of me

Throughout the book Sarah presents poetic series that respond to her own artworks. This poetic, ekphrastic dialogue with herself creates poetry on the page that has a sometimes-mysterious interlocutor. Is the ‘you’ of the poems the artist, the poet, the reader, another loved one? These poems shift and morph in acts of observation, communication and listening.

I love the textural qualities of the paintings in ‘Routine Rituals’. The use of line and shadow and colour. The images along with the poetry have an almost ‘guide to living’ quality. They surprise in their darkness, quite stern up against the images of domesticity:

No one will know if the spoon was licked before it re- entered the jam jar. And no one will call you to bed and to the relief of sleep. That midnight hour must be

 crossed alone.

In ‘Speaking Bluntly’, from Sarah’s material poetic series, we see such playful and vibrant skills as Sarah literally makes material of words and the mechanics of uttering words.

At times the images are concretely referenced such as the hessian cloth and the opening lines:

If words had a weave we would feel when our lover spoke to us in hessian

What a beautiful concept to imagine language as fabric. The synesthetic qualities of Sarah’s writing is present all through this book but perhaps especially here. The line: ‘its map of thin white lines where the fine print lies’ (47) sits right above an image of fabric that has been crushed and reopened. We literally see thin white lines that look to me like lines on a hand or a river system and so all kinds of allusions and associations are happening as we read and look. We keep switching our senses and our cognition processes, thus opening up different ways of being with text and idea, of reading and connecting and imagining.

Sarah has so many registers she is playing with in this collection. ‘Gathering Green (after Lolo Greeno’) is like a song with its use of anaphora and incredible attention to rhythm. Listen to these last few stanzas:

The springtide hides its secrets wavering women waiting women wading skirts waterlogged at the knees

How long have you been gathering green?

Between the boat and motor oil the slick spill jetty black What changes have you seen?

How long can you keep gathering green?

The third section Amiss is led by a series of poems after Lucy Quinn offers a complete shift in tone and texture. The three poems that are in relationship to Lucy’s artworks: ‘Components’ / ‘My father’s portrait’ / My father’s ferns’ are quietly devastating in their exploration of memory, love and loss. As readers we can see how the subject of Lucy’s works (honeycomb) along with the materiality of her sculptural artworks threads and connects with Sarah’s poetic meditations. I quote these lines from ‘My father’s portrait’:

Have you outgrown this frame are you climbing out or

or leaning in the better to whisper

This idea of what is in the frame and what is outside, what is spilling over, what can be seen and what can only be imagined, Sarah’s work does this again and again. I love that the ‘ooze’ of the kiln-cast black lead crystal glass is a bit weird and unsettling. It speaks of things erupting from the body, from nature, kind of pustulent but also full of life that can’t be contained. And to extrapolate from that a tender but also taut and at times difficult poem about grief and memory is so rich.

There are many ‘call and response’ poems where we see an image and then read words that seem to stem from that image that tell a story or explore a theme in and around it such as ‘Canberra Suite #4 Coda (after Ian North)’. The image is a simple photograph of a suburban home, accompanied by a short, economic poem that does such subtle work to reveal a meditation on death:

It will come for me next this hungry geometry

I love the riffing on share houses that emerges from ‘Lino (after Viv Binns’). Again we find a materialist exploration – the physicality of lino and what it stirs in our bodies, our memories, and a lovely wry humour, as well as the colour palette of the image Sarah is responding to. This multi-sensory, layered approach as evidenced in her own words:

Each home could be unearthed in strata Sedimentary layers recalling eras of pizza and spray n wipe

The final section of the book: Attend moves us into really looking at our own mortality and that of others, such as the beautiful lament of ‘Shroud (after Patsy Payne)’.

I present the whole poem below:

There are the people who
While listening to them talking
Joking
Or watching them walking
Waking working
Sleeping
In a corner
In a sad corner of your thought
Somewhere
Always
You are saying
Over and over
As ever present
As your own breath
Inside you In your mind’s eye
Don’t die
Don’t die
Don’t ever die

The collection finishes with a reprieve almost like a musical score – the final poem ‘Interwoven’ (after Patsy Payne) bringing us back to the notion of language as thread but in this poem it is not language Sarah writes about as thread, it is our own touch, our actions in the world that can be thought of as a continuous process of weaving, threading, stitching.

This collection brings us into conversation and encounter between image, object, thought and language, and the dance between image and word is remarkable. The book reminds us how each of these activities and elements are of course deeply woven into how we each experience our ordinary, complex, joyful and grief-filled lives. There is such compassion here. I would give this book to any person going through something difficult who needs a companion, a place to put some of their struggle, a way to listen and be calmed by a wise voice.

It is a book that requires slowness and rewards revisiting and relooking. I know that it will live in this way on many bookshelves and bed side tables, in libraries and reading rooms and galleries and via conversations and quiet meditations, for a long time to come.

Thank you Sarah for this beautiful offering and to Liquid Amber Press for bringing it to us. I happily announce Alight on all things precious by Sarah Rice launched!

References:

Atherton C & Hetherington P (2023) ‘Ekphrastic spaces: the tug, pull, collision and merging of the in-between’, New Writing, 20:1, 83-98, DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2022.2025850

Diaz N (2021) ‘On the physicality of writing,’ https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/natalie-diaz-on-the-physicality-of-writing/

Goldhill S (2007) ‘What is ekphrasis for?’, Classical Philology, 102 (1): 1-19.

Kaplan G (2009) ‘Ekphrasis for writers: John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, TEXT, 13(1).

Rice S (2026) Alight on all things precious, Liquid Amber Press, Melbourne/Naarm.

Swensen C (2011) Noise That Stays Noise, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Webb R (1999) ‘Ekphrasis ancient and modern: the invention of a genre’, Word & Image, 15 (1), 7-18.

  – Emilie Collyer

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Emilie Collyer lives and writes on unceded Wurundjeri Country. She has two poetry collections published by Vagabond Press: Do you have anything less domestic? (winner Five Islands Prize) and As If I’m Really There. Her poetry has been recognised in Newcastle (third prize in 2026), Gwen Harwood (shortlisted 2026) and the Judith Wright poetry prizes. Her play Super won the Drama category of the 2026 Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards and she is currently under commission with The Street Theatre (Canberra). .

Alight on all things precious by Sarah Rice is available from https://liquidamberpress.com.au/ product/alight-on-all-things-precious/

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