Told through a series triptychs—each with a poem, a work of essayistic prose and a photographic image—White Clouds Blue Rain captures discrete moments of life with precise yet unpredictable detail. Taking cues from artists, writers and architects, Driscoll gently binds the everyday to the abstract, moving from the dual vantage points of an apartment block in Melbourne and a former family home in North Queensland out to questions of form, shape and aesthetics as well as the act of making and our relationships with people, objects and physical space. There’s a spaciousness and glasslike stillness to this work that carefully diffuses meaning, never allowing it to settle.
A work of deep noticing and deep thinking: engrossing and hypnotic. It creates its own weather. In the way it moves and slows itself, in its embrace of poetry and still life, its impulse is to crystallise both meaning and experience.
Maria TumarkinThrough sure and precise prose we witness the smallest trembles of living: moments of object and mood and light that the careless eye would pass but which, in the ambit of Driscoll’s careful attention and questioning mind, reveal themselves to be exactly what we ought to be looking at.
Nicola RedhouseDriscoll creates a compelling and peripatetic emporium of lived experience, and exploratory consciousness, shifting with ease between the mundane, the anecdotal, autobiography, the contemplative and critical as he investigates ways of being. The skeletal or elliptical poems are gnomic signals prologuing the body of prose in the next section, while the photographic images invoke an aura of luminosity and shadowed mystery.
Joanne Burns
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