Asymmetry
By (Author) Aidan Coleman
Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd
Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd
1st April 2012
Australia
General
Non Fiction
A821.00
Paperback
74
Width 120mm, Height 201mm
76g
CColeman's images are lightning flashes. With lucid spareness this powerful collection contains beautiful, and sometimes shocking, poetry. The poems vividly and movingly trace experiences inconceivable to most: losing and then fighting to regain mind, movement, voice, words. It is emotional, but always controlled.This fearful experience, and Coleman's expression of it, drives the collection; then, the collection opens out into the beauty and immediacy of his sequence of remarkable love poems. In the words of Peter Goldsworthy: "What greater challenge for a poet than the recovery of language after its loss These dense, powerful poems are the fruits of Coleman's year-long struggle. They read like some profound and moving metaphor for the process of writing poetry itself, but on a far more important plane, as we follow him from struck muteness to the dredging up of the bare bones of language, a process of reclamation that seems to find its fullest and most joyous expression - its cure - in the sensuous love poems for his wife that conclude the book, the wife who was at his side every painful inch of the way."
Aidan Coleman was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1976, growing up in Nottingham, Wollongong and the Barossa Valley. His first volume Avenues & Runways (Brandl & Schlesinger) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize and his poetry is featured on ABC Radio National's Australian Poetry series, "A Pod of Poets". Aidan lives in Adelaide with his wife and two babies. He is an English teacher and co-author of a series of Shakespeare textbooks.