This is the second book of poetry by Graeme Hetherington, who was born and educated in Tasmania, spending his childhood in mining communities on the island's isolated and rugged West Coast, then taught in the Classics Department of the University of Tasmania for 20 years. He is now resident in the Czech Republic.

It is an unrelenting and unforgiving excoriation of a society in which a poet finds it impossible to accept ugliness, pain, complacency or intolerance without responding with words. And how he uses words!

"An impressively structured collection of poems, In the Shadow of Van Diemen's Land makes for compelling reading."

- Narelle Shaw, Famous Reporter

"For all the author's long absence from Tasmania, his evocations of well-known characters and landmarks, including Sidney Orr, Gwen Harwood, Port Arthur, Ma Dwyer's Blue House and Zeehan's Gaiety Theatre, are crisp and vivid...a fascinating presentation of one man's struggle with the darker aspects of living in a small community where he never felt as if he really belonged."

- Wayne Crawford, The Sunday Tasmanian