thinking about poetry

I attended the launch of Amanda Wilson’s posthumously published second collection of poetry, Cities of Liquid Light, published by Papyrus Publishing, and launched at La Mama, in Carlton.

The launch was led by Alex Skovron, who has made it his goal to see Amanda’s second collection come to fruition, after Amanda died almost exactly two years ago.

Jennifer Harrison and Ian McBryde were also there and were apparently also instrumental in helping see the book come to publication.

It was a moving reading, with Amanda’s parents, daughters and brother there to see the book finally arrive, and it was good to hear five different poets read from the collection and hear how they interpreted Amanda’s jazzy work.

Cities of Liquid Light, and Amanda’s first book, are available from Papyrus Publishing.

They describe the book as:

Cities of Liquid Night is an intense emotional journey through urban fabrics, a restless search ‘On the Road’ and back, via New York, Berlin, Melbourne, San Francisco and other cities. The forms and rhythms of jazz are invoked, as sounds of stress, desire and loss, and the energy of celebration. Musicians, writers and artists are the ‘visionary company’ the poet turns to, aware of herself as a writer tackling contradictory emotions. Her ‘ripraps’ suggest the power of art as survival tactics.

But nothing is ever settled here. Janet Leigh still drives the freeway; the walls of the city are temporary. The writer regrets ‘another connection lost’, yet ‘every connection forms a catastrophe’. This volume, with its quality of ambiguity - at once gritty and tender, guarded and open, manic, romantic, depressed or panicked - is the exploration not only of a poet’s mind, with its startling references, but of a city, in all its guises.

Eclectic, restless, yet utterly focused, these poems are the rhythms of cities moving like jazz through a range of emotions. From bluesy to manic, music is their substance, along with a visionary impulse born of perceptions ’sharp as a knife’.

‘Wilson takes cities in her stride. At ease in bohemian company, her poetry - sharp and insightful - travels to a background of 20th-century culture. Art at the heart, jazz the beat - poems so edgy and wise, they return to grab you when you least expect.’ Pamela Sidney

‘From high and dangerous cliffs she calls to us, beckons us into her shimmering wilderness.’ Ian McBryde

http://www.papyrus.com.au/

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