Water Over Stone

Like water spilling over stones, these poems seem to bubble up from the depths.


"Uncaged by calendars and watches", one character retreats into rainforests, another explores the world barefoot seeking "life's wild handful of quiver and piss." A twelve-year-old shoots a rattlesnake, an octogenarian pulls vines in the public park. Wolves travel in a van inspiring dreams of "the boundless rush and yap of belonging" and a whale offers solace on a balmy night on the Coral Sea.


These are luminous reflections on the complex and sometimes fraught relationships between society and the natural world.

Born in the UK of American parents, Laura learnt to climb stairs on the ocean liner to the States. From Minneapolis to Laramie to Chicago to New York, she moved frequently as a child and has never stayed in one home for more than ten years.


While raising two sons, she taught composition, literature and poetry at several colleges as well as offering creative writing courses privately.

Her YA novel, The Sacred Moon Tree, Bradbury Press, NY, 1986, was nominated for the Washington Irving Children's Book Award. Laura's poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia and overseas.


In 1996, she immigrated to the Byron Shire where she initiated the Dangerously Poetic reading series. Her collection, Breathworks, was launched at the Byron Writers Festival in 2002 by Dorothy Porter and at the Sydney Poetry Festival by Ron Pretty.


She won the 2009 FAW John Shaw Nielson Award and the 2006 CJ Dennis "Open Poetry" Literary Award. She was chosen by the Poets' Union for the 2003 Poets on Wheels Tour, which she counts as a poetry highlight. Her poems have twice been broadcast on Radio National's Poetica.