Modewarre: Home Ground

Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories - her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls.

It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.