The Man in the Photograph

THE MAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH is like a city glimpsed through the windows of a train on which we travel. Art-including the two arts Noelia Ramon practises here (poetry and photography, not to mention book design)- frames and catches moments, stills the stream of time, and lets the artist and her readers, her viewers, keep them; by extension, we keep our own moments again and again in imagination, in memory.

And it is mostly the "ordinary things" (a yellow chair, a teal teacup, a gull, a woman with an ice-cream, shadows, a cat in a pram, a bamboo thicket, a jazz busker, a kookaburra by the Opera House, a man in a photograph) and the ordinary moments (skating the botanic gardens, taking a dance class, remembering a dream of one's father, observing two lovers kiss, meeting passers-by camped by a beach, walking in the rain, drinking coffee at a cafe, visiting an art gallery, feeling useless and far from home) that Noelia Ramon attends to and seeks to care for in these poems. Reading this book, feeling its design-cutting back and forward in time and place, switching point of view as in a movie-you might feel, even if the poet did not always feel it herself, that you have fallen back into a deeper coherence with the way things really are, and back in step with your one intended life.