Paul Hetherington

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Biographical note:  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. His poetry prizes have included 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 former poetry editor of The Canberra Times and is a member of the Board of Australian Book Review. His doctoral thesis was on the American poet Emily Dickinson. He has been director of publishing at the National Library of Australia since 1994 and edited the final three volumes of the Library’s edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712854
ISBN:  9781844712854
Author:  Paul Hetherington
Title:  It Feels Like Disbelief
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-07
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  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

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Excerpt from book:  

Someone May Ask

Someone may ask what I have done, one day
in a bedroom with windows shut, or claim
“Your time is nearly up”, or pray beside
my drowsy body, thinking me asleep.

The dark will come like a blind in the eyes, drawn
efficiently, or like an incantation,
tunes stepping through me with shades of intonation
previously unheard, until the day

becomes a murmur, like the running tide
chasing collectors of bait on a wind-swept shore.
I will then move out into the silence
that has waited like an attendant on my presumption

and walk through the habitat of my restless mind
towards the sea, feeling my footsteps squelch
into a sound as featureless as night
except for that murmur still, like a conversation

someone else is having—not far, not near.

Previous review quote:  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.

Jeff Doyle

Previous review quote:  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.

Shirley Walker

Previous review quote:  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.

Tom Griffiths

Previous review quote:  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

Peter Pierce