The Naming of Clouds

Temporal, spiritual, elemental: this book is Blakean. It reads like Ross Donlon's combination of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems create a 'path made by words' sometimes spoken in the voice of a child, sometimes the voice of a man, that attempt to come to terms with life's voyage over the surface tension of water, that separates today from yesterday and the living from the dead. Written in ghazal form, the poems have a totemic beat as Donlon moves from the 'Hollywood idyll' of his parents' fibro honeymoon to the adult aftermath. At one point, Donlon foreshadows the stellar 'Twilight' with a telling quote from St Augustine: 'The dead are invisible, not absent'. The elemental imagery resonates throughout the collection, especially in the concluding poems 'Water' and 'My Ship' where Donlon equates life's voyage to the 'catches & rolls' of the ocean, to the 'moon's skin' and confesses, 'I swim each morning in a reservoir, a place where something is kept in store. / That something being kept is its soul-and mine'. Deeply felt and deeply moving.

Joel Deane