Ed Southorn has published a new collection, available from Walleah Press for $20 (includes postage within Australia).
Ed Southorn’s second poetry collection examines memory, landscape, history and myth, weighing the impacts of property development, population pressure and climate change in the Bega Valley on the far south coast of New South Wales. The second half of the collection explores storied spaces and places in Europe, America and the Australian outback.
Artist David Campbell provided the cover for the book, while poets Liam Ferney and Kristen Lang contributed blurbs:
Sea Lake Mountain is steeped in the littoral, the pull and push of tides in the Bega Valley. ‘The wave is every living thing/gone before the Moon/can intervene.’ Even the Monaro plains are an ‘ocean [of] nothing but land’. Southorn’s keen eye and sharp descriptive flair let the poems wash in the numinous without neglecting to acknowledge the ‘library of toppled shelves’ the settler gaze must sort through. For ‘I am water and my blood salt’.
LIAM FERNEY
These poems diversify our understandings, breaking the linearity of our human stories in favour of an ecology of thought as fluid as the world entwining it. The poems follow yearning, conflict, sadness, love, but always through immersion. Ed Southorn finds his moment, the poems tell us, ‘in a confluence of synchronicities’. Meeting these moments, we leave with a larger world inside us.
KRISTEN LANG
Available for $20, posted within Australia, from Walleah Press