Cirrus@Austlit

'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.

'His most personal poetry to date, Adam Aitken's Archipelago is entirely preoccupied with the experience of living and marrying in France. Much of it written while resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris, and then in the south during a seriously cold spring, many of the poems deal with art, Romantic and Modernist writing and writers, and concepts of nostalgia, spirituality, revolution and resistance. One key question is what France (and Europe generally) mean to an Australian writer, which leads the poet to consider the 'French inspired' work of other Australian writers. At a simpler level, the collection attempts to weigh cosmopolitan culture against that of its fictive alternative: semi-rural France, where the poet asks how we might reconcile isolation with social engagement, conservative values with more outward looking perspectives? Adopting the lens of those who live there, Aitken reflects on the region's Gallo-Roman history, its myths, its communal virtues and constraints, its weather, and on the threats to its ecology.' (Publication summary)

When Adam Aitkens parents first met his father, a white Australian, had been posted to Bangkok by the advertising company her worked for. Aitken's mother was a university graduate from southern Thailand. In his quest to understand the people they were - from before he was born through to their eventual separation - Aitkens explores letters and photographs dating back more than 50 years. One Hundred Letters Home is also an account of his attempt to search for his Thai identity during a visit to the country in his early-twenties.

"Adam Aitken’s evocative memoir probes the reasons his father married his mother, an ‘Asian woman’, by researching family history, experimenting with Plots A, B, and C, and intertextual references to Christopher Koch’s 1995 novel Highways to a War, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and Marcel Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ translated into Thai by his uncle. He tests the construction of his hybridity, the notion of his Asian ‘face’ and where it might be welcome, and where and with whom a trans-Asian citizen belongs' (Gay Lynch, Transnational Literature (ctd. Vagabond Press).