Certain Fathoms
Bonny Cassidy
certain fathoms
Bonny Cassidy's first book, Certain Fathoms, glimmers with precisely observed moments that make a strange place of the familiar. These poems speak not only to each other but to and of other writers: Eve Langley, John Berryman, JS Harry. Cassidy knits seemingly small phrases and events into glimpses of a vast, interconnected whole. There is a mapping-out here that is organic, not programmatic, preoccupied "with more-than-human subjects", "the trains of phrase and acquaintance,/ unstopped chains of heat, return, death". Cool, yet engaged, Cassidy's poems swell with the movements people and things make, making them brightly and newly visible.
Reviews
Cassidy stresses an imposed connection on natural and human-based imagery, displacing the influence of one over the other via a consistent focus on fluidity
— Siobhan Hodge
Cassidy is more obsessed with process than visual images frozen in time and their issues of interpretability and the implied self.
— Martin Duwell
Cassidy does not posit nature as something unsayable; rather as something that opens up possibilities for new forms of speech … this exciting debut shows a fascinating sensibility, and an acuteness of language
— Petra White
Shortlisted for the 2013 Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Literature
“Certain Fathoms represents an exciting new contribution to the field of Australian poetry. Cassidy explores and follows the possibilities of the poetic line, finding there vaulting constellations and deep fathoms of unfolding images. Her work is both light and intense, taking the reader to often unexpected and surprising places. A dazzling poetic debut.”