Surface Tension

'Surface Tension', Stephanie Conybeare's second collection of poems,presents a narrative comprised of individual stories and voices which together describe a journey, a life's journey, punctuated and defined by transition: a perpetual encountering and negotiating of borderlands, transition points requiring a metamorphic response. Faced by uncertainty the stranger, the outsider, finds that alienation is also a state of grace offering the freedom, and the safety, of being 'free for all faces'. Life lived in translation, shifting shape and identity, is chronicled by memory which transcends its own surface tension with a metaphysics of mystery deepening like the blue of the sky 'into midnight blue, then midnight'.