Product Description
The poems in Circle Work are concerned with the everyday, the here-and-now, and how this can feed the imagination. Grounded in the physical immediacy and imagery of suburban space, these poems transform the apparently mundane into a rich and engaging poetry. Lowe’s quietly understated poems shift comfortably between multiple registers, fusing inventive poetic strategies with quotidian experience while experimenting with a fresh take on what is possible in the lyric.
REVIEWS
“Just over fifty years since the death of the great American poet William Carlos Williams, it is pleasing to see so much of his spirit still alive in Cameron Lowe’s third collection, Circle Work. Williams was often short-changed by poets who, mistakenly, thought his short, ‘photographic’ poems easy to imitate. Lowe, by contrast, fully understands the importance of close observation and imagination. He understands, too, the necessity for skilled syntax and how a poem may consist wholly of details which are not in the least ‘poetic’.” GEOFF PAGE, Australian Book Review
“Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work is a graceful collection of poems, with no trace of the masculine, high octane themes that you might expect from a book bearing this title. Instead, the reader is drawn into Lowe’s strange and beautiful landscapes – where there are certainly circular themes at play – the simple cycles of things, seasons, relationships and days. The circle symbolises a wholeness – a completeness, but also the idea of movement and motion, the elapsing of time.” VANESSA PAGE, Mascara Literary Review
“The poems in Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work swing across each page at a strangely measured, athletic tilt. The scope is local and vast, the gaze muscular, and Lowe sweeps the vistas (from Corio to the universe) for details apprehended as preternatural…So many of these poems act like small incisions in mundane realms, letting in either the light or a darkness defined variously by the sheens, hard edges, folds, reflections. Lowe’s language is anything but blurred, and his poems are belief-filled, believable, and self-believing moments of clarity.” DAN DISNEY, Cordite Poetry Review
“Circle Work is the work of a poet who is past emerging, and has well and truly emerged. This is not a day to Say No to Poets, but a day to say yes to the work of one of Australia’s finest younger poets.” ANTHONY LYNCH, Rochford Street Review
