Reviews

"The Roof Milkers", with its broad landscape sweeps, earthy delights, subtle changes of mood from introspection to exultation, has the elements to make a collection. It is a real, honest, well-crafted, beautiful collection. And to quote from the book itself, it is "a companionship that revives me".
Poet Kevin Gillam in The Famous Reporter # 38, from his launch speech The Roof Milkers, Mosman Park, June 2008,
http://walleahpress.com.au/FR38Gillam.html

Bush Journal, entry 49′by Annamaria Weldon describes the startling immediacy of landscape, its sudden events and movements ‘ as it ‘rains down shards of Splendid Fairy Wrens’ ‘ in clear, succinct language.
http://www.cordite.org.au/reviews/zoe-deleuil-reviews-indigo

In “Splendid Blue Wren”, Annamaria Weldon takes us to Malta, where a woman awaits the death of her mother. Seated by her mother’s bedside, Celeste – a name the woman has chosen for herself (“I named myself for the sky and sea, a blue so deep that some days I could fall into it and disappear”), remembers how her mother gave her an insight into the power language has to translate reality and create meaning and order:

There are mornings, more frequent now, when I can hear a feather fall to earth. ‘One feather, enough to make a bird.’ She used to say this to me when I was little, as we sat on warm stones by the road. She would place in my palm a feather she had gathered on our walk. Close your eyes, she would say, and as I did, her words conjured a bird out of the empty sky. I felt its claws wired to my fingers, its corrugated skin against mine as I c upped its quivering body in my hand, its heart pounding against my pulsing wrist.

There is a beauty and delicateness to Celeste ’s experience of grief at the passing of her mother as it reveals to her a depth of meaning behind the semantic – “that there is only being.”
Liz Uhlmann, Southerly Long Paddock

Fenton-Keane quotes Annamaria’s poem ‘Absolution’ published in Stylus (ISSN 1447-1779) as example of classic and metaphorical symbols of alienation which are not negative (‘flowers calm twin’)
http://eprints.usq.edu.au/8640/1/Fenton-Keane_BkCh_SV.pdf

Shane McCauley reviewed"The Roof Milkers" in Indigo Vol 3, Summer 2009:
“Despite the relative dearth of publishing outlets for poetry in Western Australia, recent years have seen a considerable number and variety of publications somehow appear.
One of the most notable of these is Annamaria Weldon’s debut collection The Roof Milkers, another beautiful production from Sunline Press. Its initial print run has sold out, belying the old joke that a best-selling book of poetry is one that has had four or five copies sold by the same bookshop.

Weldon’s poetry is characterised by an elegance of style, a restraint, and the gift of wonderfully apt imagery that translates perceptive observation into the fabric of poetry. It is a cliché of poetry criticism to speak of the difficulty of excerpting ‘bits’ to display the qualities of the whole. That is especially true of this volume, in which form, the measured step from beginning to end, is as much part of the poetry as any dissected image or indeed a piece of music.
The use of language is dexterous, unexpected, precise, admirably exemplifying Ezra Pound’s dictum that a poem’s ‘sole morality’ should be ‘fundamental accuracy of statement’. Weldon’s metaphors yield far more than simple one-to-one associations. The effect is more like that of intricate chamber music, where one line falls into another, and the strand of imagery creates a sort of ripple effect, as here in ‘Windshadow’

he tries again
to plumb her shadow, chain it
to his charts, pluck quills,
plot love’s course in longitudes.

Slipping anchor to the future, she spirals
thermal
skies.

Her themes revolve around time, love, distance, change, loss, a sense of place, beginning anew, the ambiguities even in the seemingly closest of relationships. Heart and mind meet here in the mix of music and imagination that constitutes the truest brand of poetry. The Roof Milkers deserves the widest possible readership.”

Shane McCauley won the 2008 Max Harris Prize for Poetry. He is the author of six poetry books. His most recent collection is The Drunken Elk (Sunline Press 2010).