Recurrence

Although we think of the world as spherical, our main directions within it remain ‘Down’, Across’ and ‘Up’. These primary directions mark the divisions of this restless book of poems, Recurrence, by Graeme Miles. ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ in their different ways move outside the human game, but ‘Across’ travels - Australia, India and Europe – moving around poles of orientation and disorientation, sleep and waking. Miles’ poetry often turns to myth and ritual, but is not absorbed in the past. As the title implies, it is concerned with the resurgence of the apparently past in the present. It is a book of metamorphoses and returns. Central to the collection are some longer poems and sequences. ‘Photis’ is an oblique short fiction, moving somewhere alongside Apuleius’ Golden Ass. ‘Verandah’ and ‘Causes’ explore the traces of personal and collective histories, and the subterranean roots of the domestic and familial. Recurrence is an enticing collection that rewards a leisurely reading.

Graeme Miles

Graeme Miles was born in Perth in 1976. His first collection of poems, Phosphorescence (Fremantle Press, 2006), was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Prize. After a Ph.D. in Classics at the University of WA, he was an Asialink writer in residence at the University of Madras, then a research fellow at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He now lives in Hobart and lectures in Classics at the University of Tasmania.

Review

...A dictionary of mythology (or a search engine) may be handy when reading Graeme Miles's Recurrence, though there are notes to some of the poems at the end of the book.

Despite Miles's interest in the antique, the book is peppered with moments of recognition: family relationships, friendships, old houses.

There's a poem describing the feeling that often goes with the contemplation of the celestial, Shivery to think of the long spaces (the title does half the work of the poem), though this poet also describes human experience with a warmth and ease that reassures us that his visits to the dark places of the universe are more a theoretical testing than an existential crisis. Miles has written the best - probably the only - poem I have read about a baby's teething, and then there are lines like these:

When I put you down
to bed I hold my face close to yours
to hear the ascents and descents in wakefulness,
quickenings and slowings of breath. My head
beside yours is leonine,
not with the savagery of hunting, but the rough nuzzle of the pride.

It's an old world, the world of Recurrence, a world connected to the past through old stories, generations linked through breath, and the repetition of experience...

Info