I Make You Bird

Though Diana Cant's vivid and encompassing I Make You Bird is ostensibly a book of elegy, it chronicles love and loss with such metaphorical reach that its form is really spiral: the beloved is gone, but the love is back, beginning, re-beginning in every poem. Home and garden sprout such joy and melancholy that we seem to be on a slowly turning planet, neighbourly, consoling, where the claims of dream and delight more than match the claims of time.

- Glyn Maxwell

Diana Cant is a poet who has written with great compassion and care about fragile and difficult lives. Now she turns her attention to the pain of losing a long-term partner to a terminal illness - a tough subject she faces with characteristic openness and generosity.  I Make You Bird is a soaring collection charting the path of grief and rebirth, and a beautiful and eloquent testament to how we hold those we love in our hearts - even when they are no longer present.

- Tamar Yoseloff

It takes courage to hold onto living in the face of dying. Those of us who work and struggle with the impossibilities of grief in the aftermath of traumatic loss might make more space for the power of poetry, the imagination and our ordinary, human need to find aesthetic expression in the search for ways to bear the unbearable.

- Maggie Schaedel