'Tough and alert, Savige's shapeshifting poems reflect the world in violent transformation. Bodies scarred by history collide in the ruckus of generations, geopolitics and technology. Elegies on the loss of a child appear alongside poems that set a pulse to new life, biomedical surveillance, leaf blowers, fatbergs, mechanical pets and military coups. A work of fiercely intelligent artistry, Change Machine is shaped, equally, by feeling - its wild originality comes from how it forces the two together.' (Publication summary)
'If you’ve ever sat in on a literature class, at some point you may have heard someone mention Charles Baudelaire’s description of modernity from The Painter of Modern Life (Le peintre de la vie moderne,1863). His essays are often quoted when describing the transition that Europeans in the 19th century underwent, from functioning as a primarily agrarian society to one that depended on industry and embraced new technology built on principles of speed and transition. Baudelaire defined modernity, and the new sense of ‘being modern’, as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, (and) the contingent”, and suggested that instead of looking to the past for guidance, individuals should embrace the “transitory, fugitive element” of modernity.' (Introduction)
'Jaya Savige’s third book has arrived nearly ten years after his second. And there was a six year gap between that book and his first. It’s not a prolific publishing record for an important younger poet but it does give the sense of major developments happening between the volumes, something that a reading of the poems themselves supports. It certainly seems a career in which risks are taken and unpredictable avenues are explored rather, as is sometimes the case with other poets, of a successful method being intensively mined to produce a book every year or so. The title of this third book is Change Machine and, though the poem of that name is about a change machine at Waterloo station which is not disinfected during the English version of the Covid crisis when “charity lags in the polls”, it can be secondarily read as a description of the poet (or perhaps, any poet) himself. (It might also refer to a poem itself though the changes poems effect are more likely to be in the life of the author than in the outer, political world where, as we all know, it “makes nothing happen”.) Notions of change and development vary of course with the situation and background of the individual. As someone of mixed Indonesian/Australian parentage born in Sydney, growing up on Bribie Island and now domiciled in England, there is a lot of hybridity in Savige’s history – something explored in “Spork” a poem from late in this book – and that must affect any ideas about development.' (Introduction)
'Change Machine is an exceptionally strong third collection. To the extent that a schematic of thesis–antithesis– synthesis applies to poets’ books, this one both exceeds and incorporates the work that came before.' (Introduction)
'If you’ve ever sat in on a literature class, at some point you may have heard someone mention Charles Baudelaire’s description of modernity from The Painter of Modern Life (Le peintre de la vie moderne,1863). His essays are often quoted when describing the transition that Europeans in the 19th century underwent, from functioning as a primarily agrarian society to one that depended on industry and embraced new technology built on principles of speed and transition. Baudelaire defined modernity, and the new sense of ‘being modern’, as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, (and) the contingent”, and suggested that instead of looking to the past for guidance, individuals should embrace the “transitory, fugitive element” of modernity.' (Introduction)
'Jaya Savige was born in Sydney, raised on Bribie Island, and lives in London. Jaya has lived overseas since 2009, when he received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College). Since 2013 he has lectured in English Literature and Creative Writing at the New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury, a block from the British Museum, where he founded the Creative Writing degree. His first poetry collection, Latecomers (UQP, 2005), published when he was 26, won the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for a number of other awards; his second, Surface to Air (UQP, 2011) was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. He is the long-standing poetry editor for the Weekend Australian, the recipient of travelling fellowships from the Marten Bequest and Brisbane Lord Mayor, and Australia Council residencies at the B R Whiting Studio, Rome, at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.' (Introduction)
'Jaya Savige’s third book has arrived nearly ten years after his second. And there was a six year gap between that book and his first. It’s not a prolific publishing record for an important younger poet but it does give the sense of major developments happening between the volumes, something that a reading of the poems themselves supports. It certainly seems a career in which risks are taken and unpredictable avenues are explored rather, as is sometimes the case with other poets, of a successful method being intensively mined to produce a book every year or so. The title of this third book is Change Machine and, though the poem of that name is about a change machine at Waterloo station which is not disinfected during the English version of the Covid crisis when “charity lags in the polls”, it can be secondarily read as a description of the poet (or perhaps, any poet) himself. (It might also refer to a poem itself though the changes poems effect are more likely to be in the life of the author than in the outer, political world where, as we all know, it “makes nothing happen”.) Notions of change and development vary of course with the situation and background of the individual. As someone of mixed Indonesian/Australian parentage born in Sydney, growing up on Bribie Island and now domiciled in England, there is a lot of hybridity in Savige’s history – something explored in “Spork” a poem from late in this book – and that must affect any ideas about development.' (Introduction)
