Comments on Fistful of Dust

 "A rich sense of wonder permeates this fine book - Les Wicks"

Ron Wilkins's poems look with sly joy on the world, caught, without its clothes on, under his kind gaze. These are poems of tender Goethian attention to trees and termites, forks and rainfall; to the strange and glorious etiquettes of the physical world; to the human heart at its gymnastics of longing, faith, recollection and affection, and to music, running its endless and essential repairs on reality. Astute, gentle, scholarly poems. - Mark Tredinnick 

If I had to describe the "Ron Wilkins style" in a handful of words, I'd say it's a cocktail of wisdom, perspicacity and compassion mixed with just the right amount of wit and playfulness. I particularly enjoyed the dry whimsicality of Ron Wilkins's humour, as in the poem where the poet imagines turning over a railway platform to make a barge he can fish from and ends up catching something most unexpected; or the poem where he imagines stepping through a Van Gogh painting; or yet another where he muses on what Cinderella's slippers might really have been made of. I also loved the eclecticism of his subject matter and the way that his poems jet-set all over the globe from inner city Sydney to provincial France; from Guangzhou to Paris and back to Sydney again.
A totally delightful collection of poems and drawings that I cannot recommend highly enough! – Gisela Nittel