'Songs for a Paris Tramp' | poetry | ISBN 978 1 923813 151 | 96 pgs | 06 October 2026 | $20 (posted within Australia)
Songs for a Paris Tramp is an imaginative conversation between one poet and
another. The collection is ambitious in scope. It is less a biography and more a
dialogue across time. The real subject is the mystery of Rimbaud himself: the
boy who became a remarkable poet, then apparently abandoned poetry and
remade himself as traveller, trader and explorer. Landman does not try to solve
him. She keeps questioning him.
The childhood poems are especially effective because they make Rimbaud
human before they make him legendary. Arthur’s Boat, for example, turns
childhood play into an early image of the traveller he will become. The sheets
are sails, the bedroom becomes a boat, and already he is trying to escape.
The relationship with his mother also runs strongly through the book. It is not
treated simplistically. There is fear, resentment, dependency, admiration and
resistance all mixed together. However, one of the most impressive things about
the collection is what happens when Rimbaud leaves poetry.
The author’s research is substantial, but the poems are not imprisoned by it. It
has scholarship behind it, but also humour, warmth, irreverence, curiosity and
real emotional engagement. Most importantly, it gives us a Rimbaud who feels
alive. Not simply the famous adolescent poet, but the son, runaway, lover, rebel,
traveller, trader, would-be husband, invalid and ghost.
I think the collection’s deepest achievement is this: it begins as a tribute to
Arthur Rimbaud and gradually becomes a meditation on what happens to the
poetic self when the writing stops. Perhaps Rimbaud never entirely stopped
being the man who became the poet. Perhaps he simply changed the means by
which he pursued the unknown.
Jim Bennett, The Poetry Kit, UK