Pressed Flowers

“We pick flowers, knowing they will die.

We press flowers, hoping they will survive.”

Reading a poem is not so different to picking a flower. Like flowers, there are some poems we want to preserve, remember, and cherish. Poems we press between the pages of a book.

This book contains eighty six of my most popular poems from my first three books: Death and Life (2014), Passage (2015), and Love Is A Song She Sang From A Cage (2016).

Editorial Reviews

Like many of the finest scribes, such as continental Irishmen Beckett and Joyce, Bianca Bowers is an exile. A poet and author originally from South Africa, now living in Australia, she often writes about rootlessness and place, and searches for a definition – or redefines the idea of – “home” in a variety of ways.

Bowers’ poems frequently have a power, whether through the force of the language to which she’s clearly entitled given her eloquence, through a compulsion to claim the aforementioned space, or to articulate themes such as motherhood and aspects of the feminine.

There is a very creative exploitation of language throughout this collection. What we can assume to be a road surface, hot underfoot, is described as “solar-powered tar”; in the same poem, a “secret sin” is apparently sent out as a bottled message into the sea in an act of catharsis. In this and other work, Bowers has a remarkable capacity to surprise.

There are images and ideas throughout Bowers’ work to inspire further thoughts and ideas, concepts and themes that leave this reader both contemplative and envious in an “I wish I’d thought of that” way.

~ Richard Gibney, Editor of Yeah Magazine

In “Pressed Flowers” Ms Bowers does not disappoint her audience, offering masterfully crafted verse. All her poems tell a story painted with unexpected and thought-provoking imagery.

Having discovered “Love Is A Song She Sang From A Cage” by chance in the last months of 2017, I suppose you can imagine how happy I was when I learned that Bianca Bowers has published a new collection of poems!

Let us not leave her poems pressed between the pages of the book, but set them freely roaming the world by reading them! “Pressed Flowers” deserves to be read, remembered and cherished and least but not last – reviewed!

~ Galya Varna, We Art Friends Magazine