INTERVIEW: What I’ve learnt WITH Deborah Blashki-Marks

27 Sept 2022

Love, regardless — the second collection from Melbourne-based author poet Barbara Kamler — is an enthralling gallery of poetic portraits celebrating love that endures. It features a unique mode of storytelling, whereby interviews with fourteen couples are poetically crafted into rhythmic, syllabic verse.

For each couple, each poem explores the intimacy of first connecting and the various complications negotiated along the way – crushing pressures of sexual or racial norms, the challenge of chronic illness or disparate histories, and demands of extended family, geographic distance or migration. Yet these are sanguine stories that transcend the trials of the everyday, making real the possibility of mutual love and joy over a lifetime.

On my recent trip to India I read it cover to cover in a few hours I kept reading my husband excerpts as so many gems about love and it’s many conundrums. I adored it’s raw and sometimes confronting tales of love lost and found and everything in between.

The stories are truly immersive and brutally honest sometimes uncomfortable but often about loyalty courage dedication and enduring connection.