A Passing Bell

Rarely does one come across a book that is both intensely 'literary' - stylised, sophisticated, deeply engaged with its antecedents - and achingly moving, so viscerally raw that it takes one's breath away. A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina - an elegy-sequence for Tina Kane, to whom Paul Kane was married for thirty-six years - is such a work. -- David McCooey, Australian Book Review

Paul Kane's A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina (White Crane Press) is a lamentation for the loss of his beloved life's companion, Tina. It is a rare and soaring masterpiece. It is a work of spiritual genius and the most powerfully tragic new poetry I've read in many years. Kane writes from within the unrelenting grip of an iron cage of grief, to which his poetry is his answer to the unanswerable. The reader weeps and admires and is carried to another level of perception. Kane has reached with this book a hitherto undreamed level of tragic beauty. I've read nothing so sustained or so affecting for years. -- Alex Miller, Best Books of 2018, The Age