Cirrus@Austlit

'In Margaret Bradstock’s ninth book of poetry Alchemy of the Sun one notices at once the ways in which its this volume’s thematic threads intersect, compound, and grow as an overlay or web throughout the thoughtfully arranged four sections. These sections – Deserts of the mind, Turning back time, Warming, melting, dying, and Going viral – include poems which, read sequentially, make connections beyond the wholeness of each individual poem, and then beyond the volume’s parts to its entirety.' (Introduction)

'Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to find horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for elusive balance points between memory and lived terrain, between past and present lives, between grief and enlightenment. They are connecting threads of lived and familial histories, often perceived through remembered or exigent visual portals. 

'This is Marcelle Freiman’s third book of 37 new poems, a number of which have been published in well-known Australian literary journals. There are poems using longer forms or sequences, exploring the fragmented nature of human experience, making patterns and story from lives in the present or those which are lost. Other, shorter lyric forms articulate shards of memory and perception. Throughout the book, themes of loss seek a balance against moments of light.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'This essay presents an extension to theorisations of ekphrasis by introducing to this topic of research a cognitive approach to the process of creative writing. An ekphrasis poem would not come into being without an external object, image or art work. Although a draft can be produced in the space of ‘seeing’ and writing, there are many implicit and unstated associations and processes (half-registered, or not conscious at all, but still there) in the space between the engagement with art work or object and the act of writing.

'The writing of the poem involves numerous interactions with the externalised cognitive object/thought, but also with what is cognitively implicit as the creative response starts to take shape in the mind and on the drafted page; the almost immediate engagement with language and embodied actions of writing. This engagement with the visual object constitutes an intimate, complex cognitive system. Drawing on theories of enactive and embodied cognition, memory, language as thought, and Tim Ingold’s work on ‘correspondences’ in cognition of the world, the essay also argues for the power of the imagination and memory in the writing of ekphrasis poetry.' (Introduction)