A collection of extraordinary depth and focus. Powerfully conceived and executed, these poems give complex voice to the multi-stranded miseries and ecstasies of the ghosts of the old Abbotsford convent: the bewildered orphans, left always with a childhood ‘that cannot unbandage itself’, the wild girls swimming the Yarra to freedom in the shadow of the Skipping Girl; and the nuns, whose sometimes punitive practice co-exists with a creed of love that offers moments of ambiguous radiance ‘as if an archangel tapped on your soul’.

Spirited and fugitive, lively and resistant, the girls in these poems speak through a powerful blend of the lyrical and the verbatim in a bare, intense, even visionary form of ‘writing back—against and into history. Patricia Sykes merges fluently into dramatic voices so busy at grief, fear and abandonment. She knows their restless sorrows but she also celebrates their ache to live and to find freedom outside their bind of protection and guilt. These are moving, compassionate poems full of the motif of river: life, undercurrent, debris - and the deeply aspiring self. 

…The work is, ultimately, an act of retrieval that is, by turn, luminous, wry, defiant and empathic. Patricia Sykes is a poet who knows not to be constricted by boundaries, who brings into play all the resources of history and reverie, remembrance and vision, in this supple interweaving of lyric intimacy, documentary, liturgy and plain-speaking.

The  narrative force of Patricia Sykes new collection is astonishing. Each poem is both moving and disturbing, as humble as it is sad. The Abbotsford Mysteries manages to be very much sui  generis, while remaining intensely accessible. I can’t think of  another recent book in which History and Art get on so well. Definitely a must-read.

We hear a polyphony of reminiscent voices stung with pain. More that that, we hear discord tuned to symphony by a poet using the melodics of love.  Love not only for the girls who have survived to become confidantes but also for language itself, with its power to undo the curses a cold world can deliver.

In this complex work, Patricia Sykes has chosen a kaleidoscopic technique which has allowed the reader/listener access to the experiential — the personal and specific — while engaging the oblique and suggestive qualities of poetry. She has allowed an entry point to the knotted themes which arise from religious incarceration, positive and negative:  bonding, womanhood and spirituality; occultation, exploitation and loneliness. This is an important poetic rendering of a barely known history.

'How we add up is not how we add up', as Sykes so knowingly and affectingly puts it. This is a volume to both honour and challenge what it is to be abandoned, displaced, institutionalised. True the preconceptions, the cliches and shared common ground are here too, but most strikingly it is the individual and the individual nature of experience that is at once so plainly and poetically expressed. As one who knows intimately the difficulties and complicated pleasures of this particular 'childhood', I can say without reservation - the nail and the hammer, right on the head Patricia!

It is impossible to read these words—this record—and remain indifferent.