ABSTRACT
When I picked it up at AWP 2016 (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference held each year in the U.S.), I fell in love with the dozen poems they published as part of their exchange. [...]when Heather approached me about a poetry collaboration just before Christmas of that annus horribilis we were all racing to adios, how could I decline? I swept aside the teetering pile of work and doctoral deadlines, shut the door on the clamouring domestic to-do list and neatly packaged up the most pressing obstacle in a small envelope sealed with sticky-tape and shoved into a bottom drawer. Surely not an obstacle in the writing of a book centred around gardens, I hypothesised as the carrot of conversing in verse with Heather dangled so tantalisingly. Because of these missives across the Pacific, I could imagine her father's garden in Ireland and the pain of her separation from him during Australia's lengthy lockdown, and she could empathise with my care and concerns for my own beloved father, whom we lost earlier this year.