The Lake's Apprentice

by Annamaria Weldon

How do we describe a place? In this book, author and poet Annamaria Weldon offers an intimate portrait of the chain of lakes on Australia's southwest coast that includes Lake Yalgorup, between Mandurah and Bunbury. The Lake's Apprentice contains a suite of poems, celebrated essays, photographs, and nature notes cognizant of current environmental research. This elegant testimony collapses time, evoking the long past of Bindjareb Noongar land use and thinking through to a resilient future. [Annamaria Weldon is a widely published poet and essayist. She has won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize in 2010, as well as the inaugural Nature Conservancy Australia's Prize for Nature Writing in 2011, and she was shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2012.] *** "This kind of writing - the fruit of real contemplation, informed by a wide range of ideas, respectful of the reader's intellect and imagination, driven by an empirical sensibility - is, for me, where the best 'nature writing' is to be found." -- Barry Lopez, winner of the US National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams, and National Book Award finalist for Of Wolves and Men. *** "This is an act of pilgrimage in Annamaria Weldon seeks, and finds; she advances with tact and attention, she gives her readers the gift of seeing landscape with new eyes." -- Nicolas Rothwell

Genres: Poetry

260 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2014

Reviews

[Warren Gossett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by Annamaria Weldon is a poetic and naturalistic look at the Lake Clifton area near Mandurah in Western Australia. The lake is known for its ancient thrombolites growing from Cyanobacteria to form rounded structures at the lake's edge. The author became familiar with the place over several years of study and photography and writing poetry as well as knowing Aboriginal elders from the area. I have only passed by the edge of the lake on a camping trip to the ocean beach near Myalup in 1996. The beauty and fragility of the area is highlighted by Weldon's observations. I am reminded of Paul Erdös, who would say of beautiful mathematical theorems that they came straight from the Book. We should look with fresh senses and a fresh spirit at the Book of Nature so near to us, yet still so full of instructive mysteries.