In this second collection of her poetry, Jean Sprackland shows us the vertigo and vulnerability of human experience with clarity. Her poems are awash with water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, jelly fish washed up on the beach that "lay like saints/unharvested, luminous".

' Lucid, sensuous and informed by an unusually tactile curiosity, the poems in Hard Water mark the assured arrival of an important poet.