Aidan Coleman, besides poetry, writes reviews, speeches, and Shakespeare textbooks. His most recent book, Asymmetry (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012), was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.
‘The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary,’ Arthur Schopenhauer remarked in The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. While the timespan is different, the proportions are similar. Brendan Ryan’s Walk Like a Cow, which focuses predominantly on the poet’s first twenty-five years, has been written over roughly two decades. The memoir f ... (read more)
1.
Angling over star-fields,the pitches lit like billiard tables.Those lengths you were shouted up and back,lungs scoured by brillo air.The lazier concord of close mown grassand low hanging fruitof the short boundary. A tang of primitiveelectronics: the circuit board's braille labyrinth,the slab type of Amstrad.This callow path, youcannot take, curves around and through,the way a perfect river mi ... (read more)
The do-it-yourself piano isn'tkicked to matchwood, and you takethis for affirmation. When wework out how to switch offBob Dylan, your plangent homemadeswill go unaccompanied, no longersought like an injury lost in the mistsof Hansard. People suggest topics
they won't be using, and this ismore like an archive sneezethan what yesteryear's beardin physics said it could be.Quite unlike the night beyo ... (read more)
Fitness: fact, fictionor fantasy? – among thingsmeant. Parachutes
open like fuchsias,picnic hampersof kittens float quietly
down, as peakspush throughresplendent mists.
Your sensefalls upwardlike helium or blinds,
now it's preciselysubtitled, you realise –as the first tentative
steps emergeto be recordedlike a baby.
Consider the aspirinin its exuberancethat picks itself up
and turns its ... (read more)
Octopus
Quick across the twilight road,the eight legs of the cat.
Flood
Water corrects the earthto flatness, patching fields with sky.
Alarm
Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days.
Window
The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes.
Aidan Coleman ... (read more)
Weather in which I might beelsewhere, loungingbook in hand, Tim Tams(dark, perhaps), tea a given,
instead of the uphill pram push of swaying kids,singing drunkenly –what a coachman circa 1840or his horse felt, probably,
... (read more)
