"Katherine Gallagher's new collection is bejewelled throughout with haiku-like moments of vivid observation. Her delighted responses - in particular to the natural world - serve to peel away the film of familiarity through which we usually gaze. Yet Gallagher combines such excited observation with a quality of restraint, a respect for what she encounters in a process of self-creation - "from myself into myself" as her epigraph from Rose Auslander puts it. Sequences about her Australian mother and the loss of her brother are imbued with this same gift: life is celebrated in poems that never forget our mortality: "This is time we have underlined, / remembering what we've done, where we're going" ('Quotidian')." - Martyn Crucefix