Cirrus@Austlit

'Reading axolotl waltz feels a little like stepping into a painting by René Magritte or some similarly surreal universe. Challenging to fathom at times, Nathan Shepherdson’s poems here are also curiously absorbing, strange yet intimate, poignant yet playful and often subtly humorous. Some capture paradox, like the poem addressed to Ariel Shepherdson, beginning “I cannot be here until I leave” [85]. Other poems switch from human perspectives to objects, as in ‘the unconsumed apple’, which refers to the poisoned apple that J. Robert Oppenheimer briefly intended for his tutor Patrick Blackett [15-17], or ‘notes taken by a doll in Vienna’ [51-52], based on Oscar Kokoschka’s lithography and his life size doll of Alma Mahler. Many of the poems in this superb collection are given dedications to art and/or artists – a not uncommon feature of Shepherdson’s work. He also gives close attention to language and punctuation as well as measurement, to suggest the way that language accounts, or fails to account, for change or loss.' (Introduction)