Siré uses memory as a bridge to realization, and subtle humour as a path to truth rather than a way to allude it. Her words dig into the depths of people’s identities – ourselves, lovers, family and friends, strangers – to discover how much we can only guess at or what we might never know even over the course of a lifetime.

Light can be a sunflower. And light can be yellow mustard. “It’s in the bruises the charcoal smudge of shadows … a whirl of prismic colours,” Cora Siré writes, as she uncovers moments of intimacy and connection, colour and joy, beauty and light in the private, political, and historically fraught wounds of life. The perceptive speaker in these poems stretches herself towards a sense of global inclusion in the local, searching for belonging by existing in rather than travelling through physical and psychic geographies of poetry.

Cora Siré’s Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light is a lush and compelling collection of poetry. Here, everyday scenarios and even condiments linger vividly in the reader’s mind. Siré’s poetry is a moveable feast: We are treated to compelling portraits of historical and contemporary figures, including Rubin Carter and Uruguayan poet, Delmira Agustini. We are whisked from a couple’s first tentative encounters together – scars and all – to a whole array of settings. Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light is “a multi-coloured manifesto of love,” witty, charming, and filled with masterfully crafted verse.