Dad's Slideshow is a sequence charting a family’s ancestry over a lifetime and includes a range of different voices – vividly captured in carefully constructed forms. Di Slaney’s deft and evocative poems are a living testimony of what survives long after the events recorded in a family album. She writes movingly about relationships, tracing links to the past which informs our understanding of the present. ‘These are questioning poems, interrogating the past: who came before, what were they like, who did they love, what is true? The writing is always precise and lyrical, and its formal qualities remarkable. A wonderful debut.’ – Hannah Lowe ‘The pictures in this book are unfixed. Even though the shutter has clicked and folded its arms, the work of recounting a family’s history is still ongoing in Di Slaney’s sequence. These tender and questioning poems work at filling in the before and after of the decisive moment that Cartier-Bresson spoke of – that ‘dry silence after the shutter closes’, when a smile falls from a face, or a girl, turned woman, walks back into the fields she was born from.’ – Helen Ivory
