Peace

Peace is a word we reach for too quickly. Across more than 200 poems, Edwin Creely slows it down and asks what it really requires of us. These poems begin in the body, with the unclenched jaw and the held breath, then move outward through love, grief and ageing to Palestine, Nanking, the massacre grounds of colonial Australia and a warming earth. Peace here is not quiet, and not the absence of trouble. It is the table laid for the unforgiven, built slowly and never bestowed. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, tender: poetry for a world coming apart.