'After two decades-plus of quiet yet pointed observations in both Australia and the United States, The Blue Decodes is poetry by a woman speaking for herself and just as importantly about her generation, a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented. Yet, as Cassie Lewis advises throughout her work, all that optimistic blue we once saw beckoning can be regained, decoded if you will, that we may become our original, authentic selves.' (Publication summary)
'The decades in the making of The Blue Decodes have paid off. at the level of the book, it is a model of organisation; at the level of the poem, of balancing language, image, and of positive with negative affect in the lyric. There’s a sense of acceptance of the mundane in these poems, rather than that of a cleansed artifact (editing’s danger). In the book’s early poems, Lewis’s voicing modulates interior melodrama in modernist fashion: but perhaps more like Woolf than eliot. hints of religious desperation resemble similar phrasings by Emma Lew. There are some nice syntactic touches, too: “that you shelter, take in” (Vanguard); “where we don’t keep birds, God’s aviary” (in the Aviary). These are poems of mood and meditation. both back cover blurbers use the word “subtle.” The poems can seem expressionist, as if Lewis is designing a series of allegorical rooms.' (Introduction)
Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time. (Introduction)
Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time. (Introduction)
'The decades in the making of The Blue Decodes have paid off. at the level of the book, it is a model of organisation; at the level of the poem, of balancing language, image, and of positive with negative affect in the lyric. There’s a sense of acceptance of the mundane in these poems, rather than that of a cleansed artifact (editing’s danger). In the book’s early poems, Lewis’s voicing modulates interior melodrama in modernist fashion: but perhaps more like Woolf than eliot. hints of religious desperation resemble similar phrasings by Emma Lew. There are some nice syntactic touches, too: “that you shelter, take in” (Vanguard); “where we don’t keep birds, God’s aviary” (in the Aviary). These are poems of mood and meditation. both back cover blurbers use the word “subtle.” The poems can seem expressionist, as if Lewis is designing a series of allegorical rooms.' (Introduction)
