Just After Midnight

Judith Kazantzis is well known for her sensuous and bold border crossings between different worlds, real and imaginary.

Change threads this collection: ultimate change in the luminous elegies for her parents, Elizabeth and Frank Longford; baffling change in the artful, expressionistic chaos of a long diary poem on a failed emigration.

But her world remains holistic. She moves with grace between fixed forms and free verse, notably in the inventive metrics of her Homeric rendering.

One moment she teases us with Dante's "Beatrice", the next she writes a scathing satire about IDF bulldozers entombing Lenin.

Her topics are lived, in wholly original yet precise imagery.

Her gift is the paradox of good poetry: obliquely evoking feeling and thought so that they are, unexpectedly, immediately recognisable to the reader.