{"id":3841,"date":"2020-08-28T09:30:21","date_gmt":"2020-08-27T23:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=3841"},"modified":"2020-08-27T17:45:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-27T07:15:49","slug":"poetry-spotlight-diagram-leaf-aidan-coleman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2020\/08\/poetry-spotlight-diagram-leaf-aidan-coleman\/","title":{"rendered":"POETRY SPOTLIGHT: ‘Diagram & Leaf’ by Aidan Coleman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mount<\/h1>\n

This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Aidan Coleman’s ‘Diagram & Leaf’, from his recently published collection\u00a0Mount Sumptuous<\/em><\/a>.<\/h1>\n

‘This is an outstanding volume of poetry. It is wonderfully original and deliciously complex. Its intellectual pirouettes and cutbacks are a pleasure to follow, always offering an incredibly agile and aesthetically stimulating journey.’ \u2013 Lachlan Brown<\/p>\n

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Post written by Maddy Sexton<\/pre>\n
This week’s feature poem is an interesting one to me, and I hope to others too. I\u00a0find that, when tasked with choosing a poem to feature, I tend to gravitate towards poems and poetry that read like lullabies \u2013 soft and quiet words that I find less daunting when it comes to the tricky task of writing about them.<\/p>\n
This week, I\u00a0decided to branch out a little and choose a poem from a collection that I \"Unready,<\/a>hadn’t picked up before. Eventually, I picked up Aidan Coleman’s\u00a0Mount Sumptuous<\/em><\/a>, a collection\u00a0of poems that I initially found quite daunting. After reading the book from cover to cover, and then re-reading some of the poems, I found myself agreeing with Geoff Page of the Canberra Times<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n
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Now in his third collection,\u00a0Mount Sumptuous<\/i>, his poems are more like small, intricate machines, the purpose of which is not immediately obvious. … They definitely require (and justify) more than one reading.<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The first time I read this week’s feature poem, I found it a little strange, the imagery almost threatening. On the second read, I found myself able to see Adelaide itself reflected in the poem, imagining the turned out pockets of the poem’s streets to be reminiscent of the inner-city’s hidden alleys and side streets. The third time round, it\u00a0seemed almost to be a love note to a city that has secrets it can’t quite remember, filled with people and things moving both too quickly and slowly for it to catch up to.<\/p>\n
As someone who is still getting used to poetry (I still frown at the mention of a sonnet after a particularly difficult high school English exam), it was refreshing to find that I was able to ‘crack’ a poem I would usually have passed over. Isn’t it funny how\u00a0taking a second look at something reveals secrets you’d missed the first time round? Perhaps I should give sonnets another go.<\/p>\n
Diagram & Leaf<\/h1>\n
\"Diagram<\/a><\/p>\n
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Aidan Coleman<\/strong>\u00a0has worked as a teacher, lecturer and speechwriter, and is the co-author of a series of Shakespeare textbooks. His first poetry collection,\u00a0Avenues and Runways<\/em>, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize and his second,\u00a0Asymmetry<\/em>, was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He is a Member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.<\/p>\n
Support Wakefield Press by buying our beautiful books!\u00a0\u00a0Visit our\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0or contact us on 08 8352 4455 for more information, or to purchase a book (or three!).\u00a0<\/strong>We can post your purchase to your doorstep!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Aidan Coleman’s ‘Diagram & Leaf’, from his recently published collection\u00a0Mount Sumptuous. ‘This is an outstanding volume of poetry. It is wonderfully original and deliciously complex. Its intellectual pirouettes and cutbacks are a pleasure to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[315,855],"tags":[864,856,46,862,858],"class_list":["post-3841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-2","category-poetry-spotlight","tag-australian-poetry","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-spotlight","tag-poets"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-ZX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3845,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841\/revisions\/3845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}