Reviews
“…Divided into four sections – Horizons, Travels to the Interior, Glimpses of Other Landscapes and Heartlands – Mapping the world is an open invitation to bear witness to the pivotal moments and enduring memories of Adès’ encounters with foreign lands and temporary homes. What makes this theme unique is that Adès avoids the typical travelogue collection by ensuring these encounters are not only geographical, but also human. So amid the foreign landscapes of Greece and Southeast Asia, India and even our own enigmatic backyards of Australia, we are given an opportunity to reflect upon personal relationships and see them, as well, as realms of exploration…”
HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON, WET INK , ISSUE 13, SUMMER 2008
“…Readers are rightly wary of poems about poetry, but this is irresistible: a generous and subtle celebration of the way a poem can infiltrate itself, coming to fruition slowly, among the swarming details of a life observed with appetite . What it affirms (and embodies, in so doing) is almost unnamable, the quality we call ‘voice’, which resides less in the content than in breath, its flow and form. This poem pushes those features to a risky edge, in deep-breathed single-line stanzas that seem to fall off the page almost arbitrarily, yet land still running at a never-quite expected next thought.”
- PHILLIP GROSS, JUDGE, THE UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA VICE-CHANCELLOR'S INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 2014
“…The language shimmers, vivid and alive, clean and elegant: "Her body intersects the searing white glaze of midsummer sun, the Mediterranean’s turquoise bands, my indrawn thoughts…" Images are plentiful, sharp, and beautiful. Words are used like calligraphic brushstrokes, spare and assured. An egret is "stark against the dark tannin swirl of river", the poem mirroring the elegance of the bird it paints.
To read from beginning to end is to float, carried with wavelike motion through swell then subsidence, from turbulence to tranquil rest. Mapping the World is intense and undiluted examination. A rich and satisfying treat.”
JO VABOLIS, INDAILY , 27/6/2008
“…Throughout these are neatly crafted poems, but for all that, rich in human insight and wisdom, self-accompanied by brilliant sound-play. I commend his collection, I bow to the poet.”
MURRAY ALFREDSON, GOODREADS, OCTOBER 2012