Hail, The Invisible Watchman is haunted poetry - Oliver's formal schemes are as tidy as a picket-fence and as suggestive, behind the charm of rhyme is a vibrant, dark exploration of domestic and social alienation.
The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence - and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighbourhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake, community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies, an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée. In taut poetic structures across three succinct sections, Alexandra Oliver's conflation of the mundane and the phantasmagoric produces a scintillating portrait of the suburban uncanny.
