A child of writers, she grew up in an atmosphere where language was what mattered, and she has now added a visual dimension to her linguistic inheritance. She has experimented with various genres, publishing collections of poems, prose poems and, just a few weeks ago, a book of short stories. The world seems more hostile than ever and needs to be confronted with greater courage thus the title with its connotations of not shooting until you see the whites of their eyes. The longer format of the texts allows for a filling out of the language and imagery seen in the poems and their subject matter ranges from the prosaic to the poetic, from dream to nightmare. One entry compares summer holiday memories to items stored in a freezer, among them raspberries, apricots, faces, fingers, a notebook.
Relationships are a major preoccupation of the poems.
As in most diaries, the focus is introspective and personal. I dream of burning books, of whole libraries burning down. I and my brother try to save them amongst fires and petrol cans. We thrust our hands into the flames and sweep the books off the shelves and hurl them out of the windows. Outside, the snow lies glittering in the moonlight.