As an accomplished performer of her own work at Canberra-region poetry events over many years, Murphy's audible "voice" is, in a fashion, inseparable from her work on the page, and so it is with this latest volume, the wear of my face, though perhaps this new work penetrates the ear with a little less lilt and a slightly heavier heart than hitherto.

Arguably, it could not be otherwise. While some of these poems have been a decade in the making, they have been brought together in the smart of bushfire smoke, published during a pandemic and sent out (via a Zoom book launch) into a world in which acts of terror and inhumanity are only ever a news bulletin away. The mood of our times - unsettled, distractible - permeates this collection.

Readers familiar with Murphy's work (she has published eight previous books of poetry) will find many of these new poems more fractured and fragmentary in form, and perhaps less conventionally narrative, than some of her previous work. There is a sense here of a poetic intelligence looking sidelong, as one looks to the night sky to see objects of distant beauty - even when the subject of the poet's focus is something concretely calamitous. So in a poem about the busy workday exodus from suburbia, with its "magpie eisteddfod" and "cockatoo saw", we are left, finally, with a woman, behind a "peaceful facade", "alone with her healing her dread the boozie / smash-mouth nightfall".

Murphy's eye for a truthful, pungent image is as strong as ever, and her gentle humour thankfully survives these strange times. So we have "prickly pear like thorny mittened hands", and the backs of an old woman's knees as "miniature lilac landscapes", a brown goshawk "skirring overhead, wrists pushed forward", the poet smelling "the iron on that man's / shirt", or the taxi driver, pausing in his work to lay his prayer rug in the taxi rank, his place of worship delineated by "the sycamore's embroidered bark / its shimmering lime canopy".

The matters that have concerned Murphy poetically in the past persist in this collection - especially social justice and the lives of women: girls, vulnerable to predation, but also older women, or poorer women, or women displaced. Murphy's interest in finding poetic inspiration in found texts and visual art is again apparent, and the collection includes an arresting ekphrastic series responding to photographs of refugee children by photojournalist Magnus Wennman. There are also a number of reflective poems in the collection that touch, tangentially, upon the health system, poems set in waiting rooms, or on the road to and from appointments, or in carparks - the liminal spaces where individuality is strangely set aside, but where poetry may be found.