ED SOUTHORN | Pareidolia


'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.