The Held and the Lost

A moving collection of distinctly Australian poems about love, marriage and family life. Roberts is laid-back but precise as she sketches out sympathetic portraits of characters and relationships against the backdrop of swaying eucalypts, roses and occasional rain. These are love poems with their eyes wide open and scars defiantly on display, quietly optimistic but grounded in an acute understanding of the tragedies which people accumulate through life.

Roberts' measured descriptions of enduring love present a refreshing alternative to the more usual freewheeling passion in love poems by younger poets, tempering the sadness with notes of beauty and transcendent joy: 'I've loved you forever, / long before kids and bills, balanced diets / and the lines that show our laughter.'

Kristen Roberts is a poet from Melbourne who loves writing on the front porch while her children play in the garden. Her poems have won several awards and been published in Award Winning Australian Writing, Quadrant, Australian Love Poems 2013, and page seventeen. This is her first solo collection.