'An Open Book celebrates the power of poetry and reaffirms David Malouf as one of Australia's most celebrated and beloved writers.
'This is only David Malouf's third new poetry volume in nearly 40 years, so it is a significant publishing event. As one of Australia's greatest living poets, Malouf continues to meditate and reflect on themes of mortality and memory.
'The poems in An Open Book are attentive and evocative, vital and beautiful, revisiting and reimagining some of the key themes that have resonated with readers over his impressive career. Like the 'small comfort of light . . . as night comes on', Malouf's new poems hold close the precious and tender.
'Only a few of these poems have ever been published, so most of the collection will be completely new to readers everywhere. An Open Book will be the literary gift of the Christmas and summer of 2018. ' (Publication summary)
'The Tao master Zhuangzi proverbially dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and feeling truly a butterfly as he went. Upon awakening, he was no longer able to discern whether he had been a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or was a butterfly now dreaming he was a man.' (Introduction)
'Malouf covers a wide canvas and casts a light on the human condition with insight and wisdom and affection.'
Live Recording: David Malouf on Poetry and Language
Mark Rubbo
(interviewer),
2018
23468676
2018
single work
podcast
interview
'Our Managing Director Mark Rubbo talks with David Malouf about his new book of poetry, An Open Book. This is a live recording from our event.' (Production summary)
'Malouf covers a wide canvas and casts a light on the human condition with insight and wisdom and affection.'
'An Open Book is the fifth book of poems published by David Malouf in the past decade or so, and it is perhaps not surprising that Malouf, now in his 80s, has returned to poetry rather than continuing to labour on novels. In one poem in this collection, “Sunday Afternoon”, he presents himself as a man whose life is in “Sunday mode. The mind / idling on automatic with no need / to be occupied or coloured, having come at last / to the end”. As this suggests, An Open Book is marked by an elegiac tone. Words such as “silence” and “breath” are common, and “blessèd” (diacritic intact) appears twice.' (Introduction)
'A new book of poetry is offered to a world of readers where very few of us have or take the time to read poetry. Most of us are skeptical about it, suspicious of it for asking of us so much of our time and attention, and possibly giving us little back but puzzles.' (Introduction)
'An Open Book is the third of a series of “late” books of poetry whose first, Typewriter Music, published in 2007 had been Malouf’s first book of poetry for 27 years. Malouf’s poetry has been a complex, evolving and experimental thing since his contribution to Four Poets in 1962, but has always involved an examination of the self, its history and growth, its connections to the outer world through the complementary modes of exploration and receptivity, its connections to the body, and the nature of creativity itself. These themes are present in the variegated landscape of Malouf’s creativity (it includes prose fiction, lectures, essays and libretti) but within the work as a whole these three books have a special place. The poems are less “experimental” than the poems of the middle period, such as those of First Things Last, they are smaller and, on the surface, often less ambitious. But they are easily underestimated and are, at heart, immensely compressed and complex, inviting and coaxing the reader into a poetic world that looks encouragingly straightforward, even anecdotal, on the surface but which proves to be fascinatingly complex and challenging. And the invitations are part of the style, part of Malouf’s canny invocation of shared experience marked by his use of that potent pronoun, “we”.' (Introduction)
'It is a curious thing, and not a little moving, to see writers celebrated for their work in other genres turn in later life with renewed vigour to poetry. David Malouf, like Clive James, has avowed a desire for poetry now, as the main form of writing his expression wants to take. Certainly, its brevity has a part in this, for the best of poems can happen, if fortunate, in minutes, not months, as Malouf himself observes. Yet the cogency of poetry speaks also to an impulse to voice the essential in life and nothing but, and to do it in a way that calls on all the writer’s powers of sound and gesture and concision.' (Introduction)
'The Tao master Zhuangzi proverbially dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and feeling truly a butterfly as he went. Upon awakening, he was no longer able to discern whether he had been a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or was a butterfly now dreaming he was a man.' (Introduction)
