'From infancy to the last breath, David Adès turns a compassionate eye on humanity. He explores ambition, failure, love and loss with “the rich poverty of language.” – MIKE LADD
'This book, richly suffused with a personal metaphysics of light and dark, is an extraordinary meditation on the intricacies of affection and intimacy, loss and grief. Its graceful and eloquent poems possess a delicacy that might be written on the skin. –PAUL HETHERINGTON
'David Adès’ luminous and honest collection, Afloat in Light, is chiefly a celebration of fatherhood and of paying attention, utilising Simone Weil’s notion that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’. The collection extends to existence and loss, and a discourse on motive and meaning. Maps and moral compass are never far away in such explorations and like all good navigators Adès consults the moon and the stars to guide him through emotional terrain that crosses the globe via Australia, India and the United States. Poems about connection and love—familial, intimate, parental and friendship—hold their weight of history via scar tissue and heritage to allow ‘a vast and full space to fill the maps of our lives’. Afloat in Light delicately balances that most crucial aspect of life—of how the ordinary is anything but. Adès is a poet that fully harnesses the verve of small miracles. –LIBBY HART (Publication summary)
Dedication: To Natasha, who had er way with the trajectory of my life and changed it completely, and to Orli, Sarai and Eitan, who daily take me where I have never been and would never otherwise have gone.
'Afloat in Light by David Adès is, as its title suggests, circadian: like a field of sunflowers, the lines of poetry face towards the light but are anchored firmly in the soil. At times, this is the parched dirt of the desert as in “Between Us” (45-48) which celebrates the sacred beauty of the dry interior of Australia; at others, it is the mud remembered from childhood as both wondrous artistic medium and wonderful plaything. Such imagery is foreshadowed in the opening line of the collection: “There was childhood: wispy residence of dreams, / of imagination, of possibility” (“We Are Fallen” 11).' (Introduction)
'Afloat in Light by David Adès is, as its title suggests, circadian: like a field of sunflowers, the lines of poetry face towards the light but are anchored firmly in the soil. At times, this is the parched dirt of the desert as in “Between Us” (45-48) which celebrates the sacred beauty of the dry interior of Australia; at others, it is the mud remembered from childhood as both wondrous artistic medium and wonderful plaything. Such imagery is foreshadowed in the opening line of the collection: “There was childhood: wispy residence of dreams, / of imagination, of possibility” (“We Are Fallen” 11).' (Introduction)
