Insomnia's Gates
Artist-poet James Waller's debut collection lights up the page with searing images of love, loss, tenderness and enchantment. Written with a painter's sensibility, Insomnia's Gates takes the reader on a colour-filled journey from the environs of Melbourne and the Australian bush to the painted canvases and mythologies of Europe. The individual poems, ranging from elegiac reflection to pulsing, surreal imagism, linger and echo, and like all good lyrics lure the reader back, to dwell on both the music and the meaning. Australian poet, Nicholas Powell, writes in the introduction: "Painterly is a too-easy descriptor for these poems, which, for all their surface texture, have a larger ambition - to access areas of inner experience that are often occluded in lyric poetry. It is utterly tactile work that exudes the palpable temperature of things in themselves, but also what they stand for in Waller's symbolic, but never gnomic poetic." The following is from Part Two, Rings of Blue , titled For Ania You who love Chagall In his myth of blue spears You who frame Poland's clouds With inner rain Your cat is walking upon roofs of silver You can hear the dancing In those Chagallian darks Hear these odes Falling Through a hemisphere of blue They talk with your eyes Follow where your hands dream And caress ten thousand miles Of winter You who shine in the cold My hand is yours A dream of lost light Frozen in the shadow James Waller is an Australian born artist and poet living in West Cork, Ireland. He has been a feature poet in numerous events in Melborne, Brisbane, Dublin and Clonakilty (Ireland). His poetry has also been featured on radio (3RRR Melbourne) and in Dublin.