What is a Kumquat?

One of the miraculous qualities of this collection is that the poems are all about the familiar, everyday things we think we know well. There the familiarity stops. Sue Cowling changes them subtly, but assuredly, and pares them away to their true inner being. Pollen Makes my nose wrinkle And my eyes pinkle - Lucky for me I'm not a bee! I adored 'Pollen' - no easy matter to write a very funny poem about a sneeze in just four lines totalling fifteen words! All my disgust at the ivory trade welled up again when I read 'The Elephant Child', a harrowing account of the bull calf left behind after the traders butcher its mother. My all-time favourite was the very clever 'Caterpillar Conversation'. Defying quotation and reading aloud on sight, it is complicated simplicity in its purest form.