The Rented Violin

The poet Kate Daniels has described this book, Whalley's first, as "poems made from humble material: the quotidian realities of ordinary, stoical people who have constructed lives from mortgages and child-rearing, shopping malls and interstate motels, doctor's appointments and cutting the grass. What Whalley sees beneath the surfaces of those lives is the terrible price of foregoing beauty." The surprise of the book is the way in which the poet transforms these familiar things into an extended spiritual inquiry on love and loss, in language at once transparent and strange.