Cirrus@Austlit

'Eddie Paterson’s debut collection of poetry, redactor, plays with ideas of what can be said, what isn’t said and what it might be possible to interpret across a variety of modes. While we might think of ‘redaction’ as being primarily concerned with forms of censorship, these poems push and niggle a reader to think laterally about the multiple ways in which the idea of the ‘the blank’ or being blanked out might operate: in terms of self-censorship, as a way of making a particular more generalisable, even as a method for drawing attention to that which might appear to be self-deprecating, cloaked in discretion. The collection after all is titled redactor; these textual clusters are not merely – or not simply – passive victims of a censor’s knife, but in fact are also potentially actors using the technique of redaction as others might use the dash or the white space on a page. Redactor is about the things that are said on the surface, with directness and verve and engagement. It is also about the nuance under the word, the often punning or uncomfortable space levered open by irony or the graphic. (Introduction)