BOOKS

New by

David Adès

Forthcoming in 2017 from UWA Publishing is my new book Afloat in Light.

"David Adès' luminous and honest collection, Afloat in Light, is chiefly a celebration of fatherhood and of paying attention, utilising Simone Weil's notion that 'attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity'. The collection extends to existence and loss, and a discourse on motive and meaning. Maps and moral compass are never far away in such explorations and like all good navigators Adès consults the moon and the stars to guide him through emotional terrain that crosses the globe via Australia, India and the United States. Poems about connection and love—familial, intimate, parental and friendship—hold their weight of history via scar tissue and heritage to allow 'a vast and full space to fill the maps of our lives'. Afloat in Light delicately balances that most crucial aspect of life—of how the ordinary is anything but. Adès is a poet that fully harnesses the verve of small miracles."

— Libby Hart

First published 2008 by Wakefield Press and Friendly Street Poets (paperback, 86 pp., $19.95 (available from Wakefield Press and Friendly Street Poets).

“…Adès’ poetry abounds in sharp images – Captain Cook’s eyes like ‘needles threaded between the earth and the sky’, white wave crests ‘tap dancing the sky’. An egret, standing in water on the look-out for fish is sharply observed and the poet touches ‘for a moment / the certainty of instinct.’ Here, to echo Verlaine, the indefinite and the precise combine. There is certainty but with the qualification: ‘for a moment’.

Adès is thoroughly contemporary in his awareness of the slipperiness of language and the concepts to which it refers. ‘Definitions are mock borders. Meaning . . . slips unseen between the lines.’ At the same time there is an aspiration to something more assured and lasting . . . at once dream-like and precisely defined. All in all, Adès is doing in this collection what poetry alone can do. That is its abundant justification.”

— Rob Johnson, Judge Friendly Street Single Poets 2007

Coming soon from UWA Publishing, my new book Afloat in Light.

Published by Garron Publishing in October 2015, "Only the Questions Are Eternal" is one of a series of chapbooks by South Australian poets. It was launched together with chapbooks by Rachael Mead, Aidan Coleman, Rob Walker and Jelena Dinic and is available for purchase from Garron Publishing: see http://www.garronpublishing.com.

"I admire David's mixture of straightforward honesty and narrative restraint. "The House I Built" evokes all sorts of incomplete relationships, giving us enough to know what he's talking about, without being entirely specific. "Staring at an Unblinking Eye" with its "The heart breaks/and keeps breaking" breaks the reader's heart, yet never reveals anything specific.

"Poem for Stephen" and "The Bridge I Must Walk Across" shift the second half of the collection to Death, and what Love does with that. Those two are strong, and I'll be rereading this brief collection; and teaching some of the poems to my students."

— Timons Esaias