In Jane Skelton’s What the river told me there is a strong connection to place, landscape, the natural environment, and the human trace on it.

Many of the poems were written during a 2018 writing residency in Northumberland, England; on travels to Scotland where Jane was conducting research on the early life of the colonial entrepreneur Ben Boyd; and then at Boydtown near Eden on the south coast of New South Wales where a tower is testimony to a man’s ambition to build a town.