Jessica Aldridge was a leading voice in Australian postwar poetry. Widely published, she was known for her lucid, intellectually precise verse that was shaped by a life of quiet resilience and close observation. Rooted in the Australian countryside and steeped in memory, her work reflects on love, family and the long aftershocks of loss. This collection traces the arc of a poet who found clarity, meaning and beauty in language, in landscape and in the spaces where memory lingers. It covers 80 years, commencing in the early 1940s and continuing almost to her death, shortly before her hundredth birthday in 2020. Jessica was a wordsmith and an intellectual but not a professional poet. She wrote consistently but not prolifically throughout the decades. The majority of the poems in this collection were written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many were published contemporaneously. The collection has been arranged thematically to group together the topics she most frequently covered: nature, the country, family, philosophy, the death of those closest to her and her resulting grief and mourning. It has been gathered as a token of remembrance, a requiem for her and for her life. Reflecting the sense of loss that pervades many of Jessica's poems, the collection has been structured around the parts of a Requiem. My mother may have had mixed views on this choice. On the one hand, she was not conventionally religious and found faith a difficult concept to embrace. On the other hand, she had a keen appreciation for sacred beauty and admired religious ritual and its music

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