'The title of this collection, Revenants, suggests spirits and ghosts who return to the human world through dream and art, not to haunt it, but to remind the living that the present and the past are intertwined. At the heart of the collection is a series of poems about the poet's father, a Melbournian who travelled and worked in Asia as a young man, who married the poet's mother in Bangkok, and whose life and death are commemorated here. The poems have settings in Asia, Australia, Hawai'i, and France, which has become the author's second home. They reflect on the legacy of colonialism, not as theory, but as inherited experience. In them the poet himself may be thought of as a revenant, sharing his awareness of secret histories and local knowledge, stories of migration, the vestiges of forgotten people and places.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'From past to present, a poetry collection that travels the globe.'
'Revenants creates a liminal zone of perception in Adam Aitken’s oeuvre. Drawing on travel, ‘place’, family memories and indeed his own memoir work, literature and an ongoing commitment to trace and critique the impacts of colonialism, there’s also a restive negotiation between the failed diplomacies of day-to-day life and the consequences of living with the dead that are and aren’t one’s ‘own’.' (Introduction)
'Since his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices. Aitken has always been a world citizen. He was born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother, with his childhood thereafter spent between the United Kingdom, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. As a young man, he attended Sydney University and embarked upon a long career as a poet, editor, and teacher which was recently recognised with the 2021 Patrick White Award.' (Introduction)
'Since his first book A Letter to Marco Polo, published in 1985, Adam Aitken has always seemed, at least to me, the quintessential Asian-Australian poet. The double-barrelled quality extends right down to the genetic level because he is not merely the child of an immigrant Asian family but the product of a marriage between an Australian man and a Thai woman.' (Introduction)
'Since his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices. Aitken has always been a world citizen. He was born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother, with his childhood thereafter spent between the United Kingdom, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. As a young man, he attended Sydney University and embarked upon a long career as a poet, editor, and teacher which was recently recognised with the 2021 Patrick White Award.' (Introduction)
'Revenants creates a liminal zone of perception in Adam Aitken’s oeuvre. Drawing on travel, ‘place’, family memories and indeed his own memoir work, literature and an ongoing commitment to trace and critique the impacts of colonialism, there’s also a restive negotiation between the failed diplomacies of day-to-day life and the consequences of living with the dead that are and aren’t one’s ‘own’.' (Introduction)
