Pasadena, USA: Red Hen Press, 2026, 120pp.

David Mason is an American-born poet who now lives in Australia. The poems of his previous book – Pacific Light – often raise the issue of this transposition from the United States to the great south land. Since his origins are in Seattle in the very north-east of the US and he now lives on the south coast of Tasmania, the description of his movement, when taken at its broadest perspective, is diagonally across the Pacific, pretty well half-way around the world and, intriguingly, home and destination are areas which were explored and mapped by James Cook. There are a lot of interesting issues here which part of his poetry can take up although pedantically, one should point out that his current location is not so much on the south-eastern coast of Australia, bordering the Pacific as on the northern coast of the Great Southern Ocean which has nothing at all pacific about it. One of the opening poems from Pacific Light, “The Air in Tasmania”, is very much about locating his present situation precisely:

This green heart, afloat
in Earth’s more-watery half,
bears like everywhere else
its lacerations, but the land
takes flying lessons from the air
and the air’s great cleanser, the sea.

. . . . . 

Between here and Patagonia
titanic volumes of air,
the whorls and currents
cover the distances
known to the whales
and migrating birds.

We share it with bush,
the lizards, the fish, the green
rosellas coasting up to a limb -
from person to bird and back
to a person writing late at night
when the light of extinguished stars,
having crossed an even vaster sea, 
can still be seen winking
in the same abundance
we are given to breathe.

That shift at the end recalls children’s addresses which they write, or used to write, in their schoolbooks and which, beginning with their house number and street, finished up with “The Universe”. It’s a matter of locating and I feel, in these two recent books, that locating the self is one part of a double interest. The other concern is with the inner life, lyric poetry’s traditional area of competence and exploration, although it could always be argued that this is just another sort of locating where the eye is turned not outwards but inwards. Something of this is present in the title of his Selected Poems of 2018, The Sound, where, as a note points out, the “Sound” is Puget Sound, “my place of origin” but also the sound of words which initiates poetic activity. An example of this idea of poetic origins might be present in “A Word” which is built around the Greek word for dew, “drosiá”:

Some words can touch the things we want to say.
This morning, dew, or as the Greeks would have it,
drosiá, a cooling word, suitable for morning.

So take your coffee in the dewy shade,
receive the kiss of morning and return it.
Delay the job, the fretting over money.

Your mouth is open to the word, drosiá,
the skin of morning in the moistened air.

Drosiá, drosiá, like the beloved name,
the damp cool skin of morning and our love.

The first thing about a new location is exactly its newness expressed as a freshness but it is also a site of ignorance, a stopping-place on the borders of a further unknown. “New Geography”, another poem from Pacific Light, locates Mason’s present Australian position on “the land’s prow” which “aims for the Southern Ocean” but then says that it’s inevitable that we speculate about what lies beyond, for there is always something beyond. But the “beyond” is only one form of interesting ignorance: there is also an ignorance about the deeper issues of what now surrounds one:

. . . . . 
This little room looks out through gum and she-oak
to the sea. These brief inaugural jottings down
are cast out to the living powers here,

the things I’ve yet to learn of blood and fire
where the sea and river throw their lot together . . .

If the poems of Pacific Light are often about the process of changing locations, Cold Fire, this new book, seems to be more about evaluating things now that changes have been made, of seeing things the way they are or, as the title of the third part of the book says, “The Way It Is”. I have a slight and unsupportable sense that some of these poems may have been written earlier. Only the author and his editor are privy to information like that but the very fact that it arises in an innocent reader’s mind, does stress the sense that much of the poetry of Cold Fire is not about changing location so much as taking stock. And, perhaps, looking forward and asking questions about how we can or should live. One poem, “The Distance”, deals specifically with moving to Tasmania but has a retrospective quality about it:

. . . . . 
And then, across more than eight thousand miles,
according to an online map, the town
of Hobart, Tasmania, and down a road
from there I’m sitting up in bed, my laptop
open and, it seems, my mind a thoroughfare.
There’s no one to allow me but myself,
a few who know the distance I have come,
a strong wind and those same forgiving waters.

I’ve gone the distance. Others seem to think
I’ve fallen off the edge where there be monsters.
I’m off their radar, off social media,
and by their definition out of touch.
Well, I might have said when I said good-bye,
it’s been real. I’ve always felt at home afloat.
At home when I walked down the wooden dock
to the houseboat tugging urgently its lines. . . .

Although that second stanza details cultural changes (I’m told that it’s a frequent comment, especially from migrants from the US, that Australians are, comparatively, less desperate about keeping “in touch” on social media) it isn’t generally a poem about cultural and geographical changes so much as about Mason’s sense of where he writes from, where the creative parts of his personality lie. And, if you’ve always “felt at home afloat”, that creativity might derive from a kind of placelessness. That said, perhaps as a counterbalance, the next poem is concerned with place at an ethical level. “An Accounting” describes de Fresne’s initially friendly meeting with aboriginal people in Tasmania in 1772, one of the kind of encounters which begin, as the poem says, “in innocence / but leave a reader quivering with grief”. Finally, on this theme, there is “Continuous Train”, a rather more abstract poem in which the idea of existing in a state of being afloat transmutes to being on a continuous train. At first this is a memory of a long train ride in India though it might reflect the fact that for someone living near Seattle, most journeys home in America would be northerly. But the end of the poem reflects on the paradox of now being on an island which has no trains:

. . . . . 
I map the journey of my moving room,
dreaming of strange headwinds, my dry mouth

nothing a cup of coffee won’t improve.
The world outside appears solidified
by sunlight. It’s heaven and I haven’t died.
Now north and south are one, an antipode
of absence filled with light and waking love.

The train north always bent into the curve
as time bent south. My little room is still
and I am moving other than by will.
The heron comes on brightly-coloured air
in a universe no larger than a nerve.

I read “my little room”, a phrase that occurs also in “New Geography”, as an allusion to Tennyson’s poem (often anthologised as one of the most bathetic poems in English) so that it is a space “in which to read, in which to write” – in other words the site of the creative self. I also read the curve that the northern train bent into as a fretful search for the future. An earlier line comments that “travellers try to see around each bend” and Mason may be thinking of Keats’s description of “an irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

The opening section of Cold Fire is titled “Dream Job” and the dream-world, in its various meanings, figures largely. Without wanting to be Procrustean about things, it is possible to see this as a collection of pieces whose gaze is directed not outward to the oceans abutting Tasmania, but inward into a writer’s other landscapes. The opening poem, “Windward”, describes a brief scene:

We were rigging sails. I paused at the mast,
letting my little brother clip the jib,
then took my turn and raised the main, and that
was when my father looked at me and said,
You’re really a patient fella, aren’t you?

We shoved off. I held the bellying main . . .

For all its simplicity, it’s a tricky poem for a reader because he or she has to decide between its being an accurately produced memory or a dream. Everything about the poem’s manner suggests reality – nothing surreal, unusual or “dreamlike” is involved – but the context, as the first poem in a series involving dreams, leaves us fairly confident that this is a dream in which the narrator finds himself sailing with two dead members of his family. What the dead say in dreams is always important and in this poem the father makes the comment that the poet is “patient”. Perhaps it has required patience to wait for a dream in which the father finally makes contact. Again, this is consistent with the context because the next poem, “Moon over the Huon” – very definitely a contemporary poem set in Tasmania – speaks of hearing “my father’s voice though he is gone”.

Often, the poems of this section are concerned with the state in which one perceives things in a significant way. If important memories about long-dead parents appear, why do they appear at this moment? They may be dreams but they can also from the semi-sleeping state (technically called “hypnagogic”) in poems like “Caught Napping” and, perhaps, “Dream Job”. In “Remembering Islands” a head cold induces the receptive or creative state in which the poet remembers photographs of his mother – “her movie starlet smile” – and father – “the young lieutenant in his talker helmet”:

. . . . . 
I lost them in a box of papers and clothes
shipped from that solider continent to here
where everything’s identified by dream.
Be not afeared, the voices of the isle
hurt not, though I will cry to dream again.

Were this an underworld, I might have tried
to hold them in my arms and felt them vanish. . .

The central section of Cold Fire, “Poems and Translations” foregrounds Mason’s connection with Greece. You don’t have to read too far in his critical prose to come across descriptions of his life there when young and his friendship with Patrick Leigh Fermor. And the experience gave him the enviable gift of being fluent in modern Greek. The translations include two poems by Cavafy, one by Yannis Ritsos and one by Seferis. At first sight this second section seems something of a loose collection of odds and ends but it has its own structure and on successive rereading I’m drawn more and more to it. To begin with there is the title, “From Another Time”. In one sense, this refers to the fact that the translated poems are, obviously, from another, earlier time – Seferis’ “Epiphany” is actually dated as taking place in 1937. But a more important meaning is that the Greek influence – in matters of the Greek language, Greek culture – comes from another, earlier time in Mason’s life. So there is a sense of someone whose living has mainly been done in European colonial sites on the edge of the great sea, visiting what remains of what is, perhaps, the cultural centre of Europe. Socrates described the Greeks of his time as living like frogs around a pond and it reminds us how tiny and geographically insignificant the Mediterranean is compared with the vastness of the Pacific. Finally, it’s tempting to return to my initial impression that some of the poems of Cold Fire may have been written before Mason’s emigration to Tasmania: another way of reading the phrase, “From Another Time”, might suggest that these are poems written and translations done at an earlier time.

A second feature of this section is the material that the poems deal with. The translations, for example, may be, as they often are when dotted throughout books of original poetry, not much more than exercises, at best ways of testing whether the poet can convey something of the original. This is the case, for example, of the translations from Horace that dot David Malouf’s books. But sometimes they are chosen because of the way they mesh with a poet’s concerns and express those concerns through a completely different voice. “Walls” and “An Old Man” are early Cavafy poems. The former is about the way in which an outward looking person – here, the poet – finds that without knowing it, he has become hemmed in and reduced. In typical Cavafy fashion, we are not told who, or what, does this reducing. It could be elements ranging from the society the poet inhabits to language itself which, in expressing something clearly, also inflicts a kind of reduction. In this latter sense it reflects a problem that would be part of any poet’s toolkit: “Having written a poem that gets these ideas and problems out of my head, have I also, to an extent, fraudulently simplified them by freezing them in a particular state?” “An Old Man” is about, well, an old man, but it’s a poem about how we delay taking opportunities when we are young, thinking that there will be a time for them later, only to find that the opportunities pass quicker than we ever imagined. It’s a poem about the past, as is Seferis’ “Epiphany, 1937”, the poem of a man separated from a loved one, moving in an environment which seems humanly unresponsive, holding onto his life by memories.

Interestingly, one of the original poems in this section, “A Soldier of Alexander”, is written as a pastiche of Cavafy’s style. It tells of a soldier of Alexander who has left the Macedonian army in its march from Bactria to India and has travelled west back to his homeland to find that that home is as alien as the lands into which Alexander is marching:

. . . . . 
There he watched the Aegean waters range
in ranks as regular as infantry.

But he was tired, his friends and lovers dead.
His children, scattered, spoke another tongue.
Though this was home, he did not own a bed.
His only welcomer was blackbird song. . .

Despite this being “in the manner of” Cavafy, the reader can feel strong connections with Mason’s other poems. The interest lies in the fact that one (Alexander) travels east and the other west; that Alexander travels to the shore of an unknown sea – literally part of the “beyond” – whereas his soldier journeys to the sea on which his putative home stands. Perhaps the message is no more than that wise cliché “you can’t go back” or, more philosophically acceptably, that you can’t step into the same river twice. It also recalls his ageing mother’s answer to an unspoken question that begins “Last Days” – “Does it matter, she said, the past, does it really / need to mean anything, can’t you let it go?”

This “in the manner of” poem leads me to two poems which are quite fascinating. The first, “The Chorus of Sacrifice”, is described as “after Aeschylus” and that innocent preposition “after” carries a lot of weight. “The Chorus of Sacrifice” looks like a translation of the great choral ode at the beginning of the Agamemnon when the chorus describes the situation at the beginning of the assault on Troy, the Artemis-inspired stalling of the ships at Aulis, and the eventual traumatic sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia. But “The Chorus of Sacrifice” isn’t anywhere near a translation: it’s a reworking of the material in what is imagined to be the style of Aeschylus, maintaining the original’s refrain, “Sorrow, sorrow. But bring us to the good”. And the last poem of Cold Fire is “Chant of the Eumenides”. Again, it looks like a translation of the end of the third play of Aeschylus’s trilogy which sees Athene negotiating Orestes’ acquittal with the Furies (the Erinyes, whose name is later softened to the Eumenides – the Kindly Ones – either as a recognition of the new status she is promising them or, more likely, as a kind of avoidance metaphor of the sort that leads Russians to call a bear a “honey-eater”). It’s one of the profoundest moments in the Greek heritage of the west, acknowledging that winning a contest numerically is not a satisfactory conclusion to a court case, a war, a debate or a diplomatic interaction: what matters is reconciliation. Here, the dark and frightening forces which represent an older Athens, unforgiving of matricide, lose out to the newer, male dispensation but are promised an important role in the new order. Mason’s poem is not a translation of the Aeschylus but engages with this material in a style which is, conceivably, also “after Aeschylus” – “We are going now, but we will never leave . . . . . Savor the honey, savor the salt / Remember us, remember us.”

Finally, it’s worth noting that one of the great overarching metaphors of the Agamemnon, is the idea of the entrapping net either as a fisherman’s net or the robe in which Clytaemestra entangles her husband before stabbing him. It’s an image which turns up in the poems of the final section of Cold Fire. One of these is actually called “The Net”, another, “The Hillside” begins by describing a hammock “strung between two arching gum trees” as “net-like”, and a little allegorical poem, “Paddock Edge”, is a description of a wallaby ensnared in the fence at the edge of a field. The image resonates with Aeschylus’ play, showing something of the net that entraps when a new – here, the human, colonial – order takes over.