Fiona Scotney

Prepare the Cabin for Landing, as with much of Alan Wearne’s poetry, draws on popular culture, social observations and the Australian vernacular. I recall reading a review of an earlier Wearne collection which warned the reader that they would require a Wearne dictionary in order to understand the cultural references being made. Of course, no such dictionary exists, and as Adam Ford has argued previously in Cordite Poetry Review, Wearne’s poems can be difficult unless you are ‘either amazingly well-read or precisely of Alan Wearne’s generation (and interested in the same things as him) to have the right combination of knowledge, memory and experiences to understand or empathise with every poem in this book.’