Australian ravens is a book of mourning, celebration, family, misgiving, lies and caution. The three long poems in this book, 'Broken', 'Not being in Kyoto' and 'The Blue Gum', each extend the questioning of memory, place and the past that featured in McLaren's first collection, The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead. Australian ravens reaches deeply into place, making it up, trying to forget it, remembering and misremembering in equal measure, finding......the family's stories already falling into a wash of silence between the sea and the lake, drifting loose from their speech, a receding and beckoning shoreline.