Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Kate Middleton, Giramondo Publishing, $24.00.
It’s a poetry collection, Kate’s third, which revives her fascination with terrestrial and other landscapes, both actual and fictional.
As pointed out, “ the poems haunt, and are haunted by, the legacies of literature and history: whether inhabiting the scientific laboratory, the exploratory voyage, the layered history of landscape, or the voices of past authors, they are interested in the border-zones of understanding, in both the ‘the riddle of untrodden land’ and the buried history of lost empires”.
Officially, the poems move between time-honoured lyric and medley-style forms of elimination and citation. There are other instances where a theoretical turn moves away from the book’s historical grounding. An example of this is evident in the sequence of poems titled ‘Watching Science Fiction’ that are dispersed throughout the book.
Passage sketches a creative route through “orientation and disorientation, where a god in the form of a lion and rabbits with eyes ‘fantastically in bloom’ surprise and enchant at every turn. It observes the world under a watchful gaze, ‘Patient as an avalanche’.”
Gives cause for thought.
