Product Description
Palace of Culture is a dream diary, leading the reader into a personal and surreal engagement with the bewildering complexity of contemporary popular culture. Like her previous work Red Roses, Palace is a freewheeling work drawing the reader in to participate in its very construction. The layering of the oneiric on top of popular culture results in an intriguing interweaving of symbolic meanings (the notation and enactment of inner-states of feeling and being) with the arbitrary marketing decisions of our broader cultural stage. The language of Palace of Culture is not only the subject’s medium, but a source of revelation itself, a phantasm. It is something that is dreamt by its author and its reader, in the palace, at four a.m.
“Ania Walwicz’s work has always moved across genres, modes and registers, bringing self-reflexivity and metapoetics as material presences into the scene of the production, staging the subject in process, the subject in progress… Inspired by the great fabulists like Kafka and Dostoevsky [she] reactivates the avant-garde traditions from Stein, Joyce, Schwitters through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis.”
—Marion Campbell
(from the Poet) …Dream Diary. This leads me. I write dreams. The language of dreams. Configured. Freud tells me. The interpretation of Dreams. Die Traumbuche. The interweaving of symbolic meaning. Self-analysis. This is my true diary. The unveiled, revealed autobiography. The undressing of the psychological process. The Bride Stripped Bare. Notation and enactment of inner states of feeling/being. Language as revelation, a phantasm. You dream this. The palace at four a.m.
REVIEWS
“Ania Walwicz’s first book in more than twenty years, Palace of Culture, confirms her reputation as one of Australia’s leading conceptual poets. It consists of fifty (almost) prose poems, each between two and five pages length. The poems use the suggestion of narratives as a key organising principle. But suggestion is as far as any of the narratives get. Characters, places and events all seem about to emerge but Palace of Culture is a sublime work of disruption in which almost every word, phrase and line is designed to both suggest meaning and to disrupt it.”
LIAM FERNEY, Cordite Poetry Review
“Each poem is a commitment to a vision, to a mind-space explicitly shaped by the intensity and demand of Walwicz’s language. Having burst into Australian poetry with her ‘Polish accented’ voice more than thirty years ago, troubling the dominant Anglocentric view of Australian culture, Walwicz’s poetic still works to startle a reader from her comfort zone and to disrupt her expectations about what poetry is and can be.”
ROSE LUCAS, Australian Book Review
