A Blink of Time’s Eye (Figtree, NSW: Five Islands, 2025, 98pp.)
The Toolmaker and Other Poems (South Launceston: Walleah, 2025, 30pp.)
The relationship between an author’s self and his or her poem became a complex one as soon as readers realised – and learnt to chant like a mantra – that the “I” in a poem or novel is not necessarily the writer his or herself. And the status of authorial self is made even more complex by the slow erosion of the idea that the self is somehow a straightforward, consistent thing called identity. The blame for that is usually sheeted home to either Nietzsche, Freud or both. To make matters worse there is the postmodern notion that this illusory, stable sense of self is actually created by text. This “external” complexification of self is only part of the issue of course. Poetic history has long been engaged with the question One of the earliest definitions of lyric poetry, as opposed to, say, drama, was that the audience of the lyric poem was the self that created it: something, as the much-quoted observation says, “overheard”.
Faced with all this looming inevitably in the background, the safest approach for a practicing critic is to be aware of and sensitive to the stake the poet has in a poem: how his or her personality is foregrounded, altered, disguised or occluded. On the wide spectrum of possibilities, the poetry of David Adès stands firmly at one end. His poetry is unremittingly about himself. That’s not unusual – it could be said of many poets – but in the case of Adès the self is always openly exposed and expressed. A Blink of Time’s Eye is not a book where you are going to find ekphrastic recreations, experiments with language, oriental-style responses to landscape or pieces devoted to the social issues of the day. What makes the poems rewarding is that the openness enables him to explore at length the complexities of self, not as a locus of theoretical issues, but as it expresses itself as a life lived. This is a self which is stable but open to continuous and often arbitrary – or at least unpredictable – changes that the poet is very sensitive to; what one poem calls “the Rubik’s Cube of perpetual departures”.
No surprise then that two crucial metaphors in his poetry are journeys and doors. His first book, Mapping the World, is constructed so that poems about journeys to different parts of the world are followed by poems about journeys into the self – the second section is called “Travels to the Interior” – poems about other people, “Glimpses of Other Landscapes”, and finally poems about personal relationships, “Heartlands”. There isn’t anything especially new here – the idea that “the voyage out is always a voyage within” is an old one – but it establishes for the reader, a distinctive sense of an open self doing its best honestly to investigate the life in which it finds itself.
This stance continues in A Blink of Time’s Eye, appearing nearly twenty years after Mapping the World. Like that first book, it has four sections though here they are given a circularity by having the epigraph to each section be a line from a poem in the next section and the epigraph to the last section being a line from a poem in the first section. I’ve puzzled about this choice but come to the conclusion that Adès wants to stress that the development of the self is more complicated than a linear progression from childhood to adulthood to age. Seeds of one stage can be found in later sections of the life but also experiences in age can seem to effect what happens in youth. At any rate, we begin with poems written from the perspective of the present, the perspective of age. “Today’s Weather” opens with a nice joke about birth and ageing:
In the end, as in the beginning, it is about contractions:
not bursting out now but falling inwards,
the way water falls into dry earth,
the way life is sucked up by death . . .
but goes on to put this obsession with the experience of ageing aside to focus on something that inevitably appears with ageing – the need to both evaluate and predict, to be a “detective to my own life”:
But today’s weather is not preoccupied with such things:
beyond a glance, the acknowledgment
of a mental nod, I am immersed in forecasts,
sifting for meanings still, following clues
I have appointed myself detective to my own life
and am busy tracking down motivations,
fears, agendas, all those fingerprints of behaviour. . .
On such a quest one has to be careful to avoid to temptation to polish the sense of self one is creating, to put a self-congratulatory gloss on things:
there are leads heading off in every direction -
some false, no doubt, to throw me off the scent,
but I am stubborn and persistent
and appreciate the chase,
no matter that I am slow and fuddled,
that I hold things in my hands
without knowing what they are,
that I may not like what I find.
This notion, in such an early poem in the book, that discovering oneself is like a detective’s quest is a good way of balancing the usual metaphors of doors and journeys, both of which have been used by various self-improvement industries and thus can have a slight tang of contemporary cliché.
“Today’s Weather” comes near the beginning of A Blink of Time’s Eye. A poem at the end, “Exit”, uses a quite different metaphor – that of life as something seen on the screen – though it too begins with a joke – “It’s possible I am on the way out, though I haven’t moved”. Watching the film of life – the film of others’ lives as well as his own – requires a lot of fraught hermeneutic work:
. . . . . leaving me to navigate minefields of dialogue and subtext, disoriented, bewildered, picking my way through the debris of wounded lives, lives curling in on themselves and withering, the unfathomable legacies of every intentional and unintentional betrayal . . .
The detective and the film-viewer are metaphors from the aged self attempting to understand what by now should be a rich enough volume of experience. Those experiences themselves are still dominated by metaphors of doors, journeyings and, perhaps as a sub-section of journeys, swimming – “how easy it is to drown in the wild seas of being”.
“He Waves Now Farewell” describes the self as “the boy who became // the man whose whole life has been / departure since the day of first arrival” and the idea is taken up in the next poem, “So, the Road Diverged”, which, true to its title, is interested in the continuous forking of the paths of life:
. . . . . and the further he went, the further it seemed he left himself behind, until this became his story, the strange sound of his name on his tongue, obscure scars on his skin, erratic drip feed of memory, and he came at last to a clearing, gathered sticks, made a fire and sat before its warmth, stilled himself, each passing tremor of being, dreamed of metamorphosis, renewal, erasure, only to get up again, whoever he was now, whoever he had become, and continue on, all the diverging roads of his life.
A feature of the self is the way it is located in time. It is always in the present, the immediate moment, but it carries within it the memories of the past. When those memories are of personal matters they are events which occurred to the self in one of its earlier manifestations of course and so the memories of an individual are hitched to a different self. In “Fly Trap”, two girls from youth are remembered as well as the ignorances of the poet himself:
I’m dancing with Dikla and wanting to be dancing with Tamari - who wants me to dance with her too, though I don’t know that until later, our lives so full of the unsaid, of misunderstandings snowballing across time . . .
Desire is seen not as an endless circle but as something “full of ebbs and flows”:
. . . . . caught so often buzzing in the fly trap of the moment I hardly see it disappear, like Dikla and Tamari both from my life . . .
My favourite of these memory poems is “Pin Drop” which has a very beautiful metaphor for the way the past enters the present:
The night treads gently, unbroken by scuffed footsteps, a snapping twig, branches shiver-shivering in wind. On the edge of sleep or dream I think I hear past whispering into the tent of the present again. The encampment is quiet: future’s troops lie sprawled, sleeping, the sentries silent at their posts. Your name falls into my ears from the lips of the past pushing at the flap of my tent, letting you back in. Thirty years, I have missed your face. The soldiers stir. Tomorrow is coming and still, nothing is sealed, nothing inscribed.
Such a remorseless investigation of the self raises the possibility of either solipsism or egotism but there’s no sense of these in the poems. As with Mapping the World, there are poems concerned with others although all of these others – parents, friends, children – are firmly attached to the poet. One poem, “My Imagination Failed Me”, makes fun of this centering of the self by describing how, as a child, he assumed that all the visitors to the house were “pulled in towards me” when in fact it is his mother they have come to see. As an adult he is well aware that, although our lives are the centre of a circle of family and acquaintances, this is true for everybody else: it’s ultimately a decentred world. It’s no surprise that this is a poetry without dramatic monologues, that traditional way of exploring a self through a character which cannot be a development of one’s own self but which may throw light on that self by resonating or contrasting.
A slim volume, The Toolmaker and Other Poems seems, on the surface, a deliberate corrective to A Blink of Time’s Eye. It’s a set of portraits, all in a similar fifteen-line format, in which the personality of the poet doesn’t enter in any obvious way. The first poem is about a toolmaker and his knowledge that one day his tools might fail him, knowledge that enables him to have a more balanced and humane approach to the work itself. This is obviously pregnant with allegorical possibilities about the poet’s own vocation. On the book’s cover, however, the author explains how, having written the first as a way of suggesting that his own career as a lawyer leads others to an inadequate sense of what his self is really about, other poems in the same mode “insisted on being written”. So the book could be read as a series of complaints about how we crudely categorise people. But I would want to read it rather differently, if tentatively. That first poem is really an allegory about the way the self of books like A Blink of Time’s Eye goes about making the poems. True, it does move into a different mode but it could be read as an envoi to A Blink of Time’s Eye exploring something of the complexities of the relationship between a poet and his tools that have been involved in producing the poems of the book. Once this mode is established, it then becomes a little doorway into a world in which different interiorities of different professions can be sketched in. It’s revealing that few of these “portraits” are actually of professions: many are about activities such as mentoring, somnambulating, being a benefactor, an observer, and so on. In other words, what looks like a movement away from the self – and from those friends and family that the self knows intimately – into a world of quite different people, this book actually could be said to neatly focus on the productive, interior lives of people like poets, in this case the author. This may be slightly perverse, but it is interesting that one of the profession/vocation/activities is that of the poet. This poet is female – the gender of the individuals in the book alternates scrupulously fairly – and in her dreams searches for intimations, “not seeking revelation so much as a glimpse”:
. . . . . In such fertile ground, there is so much hidden to be found the work is endless, the days pass in a blur between night and night, mystery’s embrace never failing her.
