This is What Gives Us Time

This book of poems was written over one intense year of writing, at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome during an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship. While Brophy’s poems are, on the one hand, often deeply steeped in this sensate, embodied Roman experience, the particular becomes universal as in all powerful poetry. This is what gives us time is at heart a dance of dualities and their volatile questions, of which the poetry is delicately aware. In this, Brophy exemplifies an ethical, even moral, determination. The work is underlined by love, never sentimentally, both romantic, and for one’s fellow humans and creatures.