By turns funny, crude and, above all, moving, The Blue Room is the work of a true artist. Gathered from notebooks written throughout Spinazzola’s lifetime the poems here are the expression of a young artist of our generation.

Tina is short, but she packs a wallop. And she knows every move a boxer needs to get to the top. It’s 1979, and the glory days of the sport are over. With the family gym about to fold, and her father unwilling to listen to a word she says, Tina explodes and takes off, leaving Sydney’s Whitney Pier behind her for good. But it isn’t her temper …

Rev. Duncan B. Blair (1815-1893) was an excellent linguist, a good poet and a devout man. “As an accurate writer of Gaelic he had no superior,” espoused A. Maclean Sinclair. Blair composed sacred and secular poems, laments and songs and prose, many of which were published in Mac-Talla, the famous Gaelic newspaper published in Sydney, Nova Scoti …