Stone Mother Tongue

(Paperback)

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"Malta'a slight blemish on the sea's glaze'forms the beating heart of Stone Mother Tongue, poems fired into existence by Annamaria Weldon's experience of clambering over temples and monuments built by her ancestors. Now part of her psyche, they are melded with a wider experience of Australia as an ancient land. For Weldon, life is 'all context and erasure'. When she writes of the masons knowing 'which prayers to chant while hammering', her poems entwine the land with a human history many thousands of years in the making." - Kevin Brophy

"Meditative, delicate and restrained, these poems are nonetheless full of vivid realities: the 'undersong' of womanhood, family, loss, carob trees, wild rosemary, figs, geckoes, mother's milk and psychotropic chickpeas. Delving into her Maltese heritage, Annamaria Weldon shows us how the migrant's encounter with Australia provokes a reinterpretation of 'home', a grappling with place of origin." - Tracy Ryan

Author Bio

Annamaria Weldon was born in Malta and emigrated to Western Australia in 1984. She has been awarded artist residencies with Symbiotica at the University of Western Australia (2009) and St James Cavalier in Malta (2016), and has undertaken many field trips for research. Her publications include Ropes of Sand (Associated News Malta, 1984), The Roof Milkers (Sunline Press, 2008), and The Lake's Apprentice (UWA Publishing, 2014). Annamaria was awarded the inaugural 2011 Nature Conservancy Australia Essay Prize, the 2010 Tom Collins Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted in the Australian Book Review's Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2012. Her writing centres around place and displacement.