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POETRY
Beautiful dislocations
David Malouf. Revolving Days. St. Lucia, QId: University of Queensland Press, 2008. 198 pp. A$26.95. ISBN 978-0-7022-3635-8
In the title poem of this book, a selection of the poet's work ranging from the early 1960s to Typewriter Music (2007), David Malouf writes:
. . . What I remember
is the colour of the shirts. I'd
bought them
as an experiment in ways of seeing
myself, hoping to catch
in a window as I passed what I was
to be
. . . But sometimes, knotting my tie
at a mirror, one of those selves I
had expected
steps into the room.
"Revolving Days" is a fitting title poem not only for the strength of its address to a former love, but for its referencing of the different selves that this collection catalogues. In his author note, Malouf explains that poems appear according to the places or events that "touched off the writing. The book's four parts, then, reflect four broad stages of the poet's life, regardless of when particular poems were penned. "Like our First Paintbox," in which Malouf's child self thumbs through the "Disney-gaudy" world of color, subsequently appears early in Part I, dealing with the author's Brisbane childhood and youth, though it was published only recently in Typewriter Music. That said, the period explored and the time of publication frequently coincide so that, for example, the poems in Part IV, dealing with the latter decades...