From Mireille Saba Redford, author of A City Across the Night, The Waltz of Dust and The Wounded Virtue, and translator and editor of The Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, here is a new collection of English poems that will take you to a forgotten land where nothing seems to matter anymore.
A World of Stone adopts the voice of a woman who finds her life turned upside down when faced with the harsh realities of the modern world and clings to her childhood memories, when the land of legends was a truly mysterious and captivating place.
It highlights her love that could not overcome her pride, her loneliness caused by the many losses she has encountered, and her sorrows amidst the fast and sad changes in the world, such as humanitarian crises, drug abuse, violence, alienation, inequality, power in the hands of the few and abuse of human rights.
Throughout the poems, you will hear and feel all the torments, disappointments and cries which somehow have the power to change the way some perceive the world. However, there is a clear message that despite losing its ‘gentility’, the world can still have a ‘Margin of Peace’ that would guarantee its security and sustainability.
This book of love and anger, of the living and the dead, displays the values that once formed the very pillars of our society, and sends a call to restructure what is left and to stop the decline in civil liberties. Its vivid descriptions shed light on the poet’s own experiences, while stressing the need both to save a world on the brink and to alleviate the suffering of the most vulnerable by a return to the humanitarian principles of equality and justice.
