The Seven-eight Count of Unstoppable Sadness

A life lived with melancholy, its spikes, its other rhythms, its insistence. In the end, when we learn this part of us is part of us, is not our enemy, when we live long enough to eschew fear of judgments – social, medical, personal – eschew the idea of ‘normal’ and the label of ‘well’, what can these undercurrents of sadness teach us.

These lyric poems, written over a decade, don’t attempt answers. They emerge from observation, reflection and re-imagining, from the desire to make peace with the self, beloveds, the past. In doing so, they ask if there are other emergent possibilities – patience, acceptance, gratitude, compassion, courage, hope – when we live with sadness that will not be banished, sadness that for the narrator of these poems is as inescapable as the earth on which she stands or the air she breathes.

About the Author

Marcella Polain was born in Singapore, and migrated to Australia with her Armenian mother and Irish father. This is her fourth poetry collection. Her first, Dumbstruck, won the Anne Elder Award. Therapy like Fish: new and selected poems (2007) was short-listed for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She has also published two novels. The most recent, Driving into the Sun (2019), was written with the assistance of an Australia Council grant. Her first novel, The Edge of the World , was short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book. Her writing has been published internationally and in translation. In 2015, she was awarded the gold medal by the Writers’ Union of Armenia.

She currently holds a Senior Lectureship in the Creative and Professional Writing program at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia.