This is Freiman’s fourth collection of poetry, written as a memoir of poems as separate ‘vignettes’ or remembered fragments from her life in South Africa from childhood to adulthood. Having always drawn on memory as creative and poetic inspiration, she has felt the need for a deeper, perhaps less nostalgic or masking approach in order to make sense of a life lived as a white child and young adult during the years of apartheid; the effects of living in a society of legalised racism – a personal truth-telling. The poetry self-reflexively examines the power and vagaries of memory and writing, and the psychic ambiguities of migration and identity, of leaving and settling – patterns in her family since the years before WWII and her own later migration from South Africa in 1977 to London and then to Australia in 1981.
