The Lake's Apprentice

Book excerpt: 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 writing: 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