It Feels Like Disbelief: (Salt Modern Poets)

It Feels Like Disbelief is a remarkable book. Its poems are contemporary and engaged, sometimes edgy, yet they exhibit a skilled formal control and a marvellous capacity to make music out of language. There is an emotional strength at the core of these poems which allows the reader to accompany the poet on a series of shared and satisfying personal journeys. The poems are also rewardingly wide-ranging, dealing with subjects as various as human intimacy, sensuality and love, history, refugees, fishing, books, photography, reading, desire, bushwalking, gardening, children, opera, archaeology and the Iraq war. Throughout there is an elegiac sense of the imminence of loss; of how time and history undo the very things that we know and take for granted. Many poems reveal often troubling or mysterious domestic interiors, along with intense moments of recognition and recollection. The book contains a number of longer poems as well as numerous lyrics, including a rewarding series of sonnets. These are all poems that amply repay a first reading and they will further reward the reader who becomes familiar with their subtleties and intricacies. Hetherington returns to various themes and motifs throughout the volume. Music is one example, which first figures in the phrase 'elegant singing lines of silver death', soon becomes 'Bach's singing tune' and then a scale that 'rippled up and down the house'. By the end of the volume music is 'the call / of being that is usually unheard'. In such ways, these poems explore and recast human perceptions, while also conjuring memorable images and phrases. This poetry collection is extraordinary in the way that it combines figurative language with plain-speaking. When the poet says that a wasp represents 'some trouble or beauty / transformed', he might have been speaking for the transformative power of his collection as a whole. Paul Hetherington is the award-winning author of seven previous books of poetry and this new collection confirms his position as one of the most gifted poets of his generation.

Table of Contents:
AN IMAGE OF TIME September You Speak Snag Prep-School Boarder, Aged Nine Detention 1789 Jealousy A Cat’s Bowl Stalk Need The Wasp Abschied DOMESTIC SUITE Domestic Suite IN THIS TRANSLATION Settling Scissors Skin Backwards Cocoon Boys Still There Renovations In This Translation Syntax Scarf-Light Sea THE PLACE OF WATER Eyes Hands Patterns Love and Music Mind’s Eye Your Thought Garden Stasis Quandaries Dressing Evening Bushwalking The Place of Water SOME SOFTER PART OF BEING Words You’ve Kept A Writer’s Habits Reading Casual Sonnet Pages Painting Opera New Music Some Softer Part of Being Harold Cazneaux Now It Starts Again Upon the Roof Drawer Someone May Ask WAKING AT NIGHT The Library of Lost Books The Pickerel Furlong Waking at Night Insect During the Night Archaeology Pick-up IT FEELS LIKE DISBELIEF It Feels Like Disbelief

About the Author :
Paul Hetherington lives in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, most recently the novel in verse, Blood and Old Belief, which was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He won the 1996 Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award (for Shadow Swimmer) and a 2002 Chief Minister’s ACT Creative Arts Fellowship. He was founding editor of the National Library of Australia’s quarterly humanities and literary journal, Voices (1991-97), is a member of the Board of Australian Book Review and is a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times. He has been director of publishing at the National Library of Australia since 1994 and edited and introduced the final three volumes of the Library’s authoritative four-volume edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend.

Review :
Hetherington’s Acts Themselves Trivial is a most impressive volume, filled with sinuously delicious verse, in which the subject of poetic self-analysis, in and out of its various love affairs … with people, ideas and things, weaves a masterful spell of words. This is poetry of glowing sensuality, of urgent narrative pace, of tact in its exploration of intimate experience. Hetherington is an important poet with a growing national and international reputation, and this is some of his most accomplished work. Paul Hetherington’s poems conjure the power of words, not just in the way he uses them, but in the way he invokes the visceral nature of language, the sheer gutsiness of writing. In this entrancing volume of selected poems … we see Paul wrestling with words, words that come from within himself, but also manifest, embodied words as separate, unruly beings in this world, unpredictable creatures that he seeks to tame and harness. Blood and Old Belief is a sombre, disquieting work. Its poetic craft is of a high order. Without enough notice being taken, we may have moved into a vintage period of Australian verse, where the generation after Murray and Page … renews faith in what can be done here, in and by poetry