Humus-rich Food for the Soul: Karen Sedaitis' Soul Dark Soil

In "Respite", Marg agrees to help a tired mother cope with her daughter Ruby, by offering respite, or care, one day a week. Ruby's shocking act creates a chain of associations in the reader, linking care and love with death and rejection. It is a chilling and powerful story which takes the careful, thoughtful details of Marg's life, the rich yellow of the homemade pumpkin scones, fancy teas and china, flowers and polished furniture, and imposes the twitchy, fearful world of Ruby's, hinting at her own inner world, and the damage, mingled with her childlike beauty, lateral thinking, and how she is alive to the moment. This mingling of Ruby's capability for evil, coupled with her beauty and innocence is very powerful. The details are familiar ones - the tea, the food, the chicken run, the tiredness of parenting, transformed into something surreal, horrific, and utterly believable.

"Laugh, Kookabura" takes us through the most familiar of settings - our own backyard. A simple walk to the water tank for the source of a bad taste reveals a brown snake, which bites. This is the plot. It couldn't be more basic, but the language is extraordinary, beautiful, as the protagonist runs away from the snake, in spite of knowing not to run: "it didn't matter a damn, had melted down into unrecognisable gibberish." The gorgeous transformation in the end, death in the face of a bloated infection causing kookabura is what makes this story shine: "She looked up to the light and saw a shadow circling up there, its wings wide and black, filling her vision in that cool wet world, perched there, waiting to swoop, and she pictured her babies all tucked up, their faces wide and pink, before the wings spread wider and wider and encompasses her world, until there was nothing." Sedaitis avoids any hint at purple prose, despite the coolness of the water, or lush overgrown environment, and lets the strong image of the woman "cavorting in a wild and uninhibited hoe-down" work on the reader, creating impressions that stay with the reader long after the book is put down.

Soul Dark Soil is filled with stories like these, all taking on the transformative, power and immediacy of poetry. The language is always beautiful, broody, and immersed in the natural and psychological world. The weaker pieces are those which take a male narrative voice. "Self Portrait", with its tortured gay artist,

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