Luke Beesley

The poems in this new collection by Luke Beesley – a master of the surreal and the observational – capture the exact moment of writing: how, from it, possibilities branch out into observation, memory, word play, analogy, fantasy, other artworks and other art forms. The book is intimate, familial, often moving; it is also sparklingly clever and alert to the imaginative possibilities that can open out from the minutiae of days.

Aqua Spinach rounds out a trilogy of books interested in the affinities between poetry and the visual arts, music and cinema. The poems invoke a playful synaesthesia as they pivot and twist, producing strange and at times absurdist imagery from the ordinary and happenstance. The reader is tipped into humorous, dreamlike scenarios infused with the atmosphere of surrealist cinema – ‘they called him Dylan because he kept a harmonica along his cough’ – each poem a sublime montage that also speaks to the distracted pleasures of contemporary consciousness.

The poems in this collection blend observation, memory and anecdote – with particular interest in American film, rock music, visual arts and poetry, and the way they inhabit the poet’s everyday life in contemporary Melbourne. They create ‘an uncanny universe’, which hovers somewhere between the real world and that of the poet’s imagination, characterised by surprising encounters and fleeting details rendered with the utmost clarity, full of intimate disclosures and yet somehow public in its openness, where everything is animated by liveliness – objects, sensations, colours, even words as they appear on the page.

Throughout New Works on Paper the reader remains curious about where the word, the association, the poem itself, will go next. There is fascination in this continuing interest, surprise, puzzlement, delight and comedy. These effects owe much to the poet’s sketching in of detail and the sharpness of his observations; to the glissando effect evident in his use of language, and the dynamic role played by colour, texture and movement in his writing. The interplay between these elements, not only within each poem, but between them as well, encourages one to think of poetry as process, in a way which allies it to the other arts. Music, painting and film are often invoked in this collection, but it is Beesley’s poetic technique which really explores the continuity and overlap between these different art forms.