Earth Hour

David Malouf

Earth Hour
Format
Hardback
Publisher
University of Queensland Press
Country
Australia
Published
26 February 2014
Pages
96
ISBN
9780702250132

Earth Hour

David Malouf

We sit in the warm dark watching container-ships ride on blue-black moonlit glitters.

After long journeying arrived at the high tide of silence, after talk.

David Malouf’s new collection comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of ‘silence, following talk’ after its exploration of memory, imagination and mortality.

With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on ‘this patch of earth and its green things’, charting the resilience of beauty amidst stubborn human grace.

Review

David Malouf creates cosmologies around what we typically regard as banal spaces – most famously suburban Brisbane in works such as Johnno. His novels, short stories, essays and poetry are each a virtuoso of memory, exploring the flesh of experience that weds space to time. Though his prose receives more attention than his verse, Malouf’s career as a poet is long-standing, with Earth Hour marking his tenth poetry publication since ‘Interiors’ appeared in 1962.

In Earth Hour, Malouf again produces a graceful and provocative vision of life. This collection continues a desire to define space (earth) and time (hour) through each other, as the title subtly suggests. But while this is a strong theme across Malouf’s accomplished career, Earth Hour has the freshness of a newly imagined world. And in many ways that is precisely what this collection represents, Malouf’s gift for imaginative inhabitation. The poems weave through gardens, cities, bays and seascapes, reveling in the varied ways memory imprints space. In poetry Malouf seems particularly adept in the art of planet-shrinking, wrapping the self in a subjective map of the world.

Animated by memory and history, Earth Hour brings past to present in many ways. Time is an enigma where centuries telescope into days, and the sediment of history fills the earth as ‘dead under the topsoil’. Not only does history inscribe cartography, it also speaks the words of yesterday’s heroes today, as shown in the poems after Charles Baudelaire and Heinrich Heine. Throughout this collection there is the radiance of a master poet, whose technical flair delights equally in light and shade, abstraction and whimsy. Many writers of prose also write poetry, but rare are the novelists who are also major poets in their own right. Malouf is a heavyweight of Australian poetry, and Earth Hour is sure to be among the finest poetry publications of 2014.


Lucy Van is a freelance reviewer.

This item is not currently in-stock. It can be ordered online and is expected to ship in 3-5 days

Our stock data is updated periodically, and availability may change throughout the day for in-demand items. Please call the relevant shop for the most current stock information. Prices are subject to change without notice.

Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to a wishlist.