'Pareidolia' | ISBN 978 0 645797 794 | 150 pgs | July 2024
Ed Southorn's poetry reflects an interest in place and space, derived from Lefebvre's spatial practices,
representation of space and spaces of representation. He is also interested in eco-poetics. His poems,
narrative journalism, short fiction and memoir have appeared in
Cordite Poetry Review, Axon: Creative Explorations, Meniscus, Blackbox Manifold, Bluepepper, The Blue Nib,
The Journal of Wild Culture, Moveable Type, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. His PhD in sociology
and narrative journalism explores contested space. His MPhil in creative writing is a history of surfing.
Ed lives at Bermagui on the south coast of New South Wales.
His interest in pareidolia is explored in
an article in Axon
JANE FRANK
Ed Southorn’s Pareidolia is a striking first full collection that
demonstrates wide-ranging and sensory appreciation of history,
mythology, art, land and coast. These poems of jagged staccato images
and driving rhythms stunningly interrogate the familiar and engage
fundamental human questions in ways that continually impress and
surprise.
STEPHANIE GREEN
Fierce, incantatory, rich with beauty, irony and desire, these poems by
Ed Southorn seek to make a kind of order from chaos, often taking the
form of an homage, capturing the ‘sacred act’ of reaching out to touch
that which must always be elusive.
Weaving moments of longing and reconnection with the strange
resonances of remembered places, found images and lost encounters,
Southorn remakes the traces of ancient and modern worlds into a new
vision of experience.
These are poems that know how to ride the wave of memory turning
and shaping the clay of language into something we can all, vicariously,
share.
STUART COOKE
Here is a book that demands - and will command - your attention. These
are poems of a perception so sharp that it cuts, and so supple that any
blades become molten in a furnace of poetics and “twinning physics of the
soul.” Think muscularity and musicality, Les Murray mixed with Liam
Ferney. And beyond all that, one note is resoundingly clear: Southorn is
a poet who knows how to end his poems with bang after bang after bang.