Product Description
The poems in Regulator reveal an observant eye and an acute ear; the language is evocative, precise and sensuous. There are poems of the natural world, bristling with death and transformation, and of the everyday/dangerous laboratory. In Benjamin Dodds’s childhood Australia, the Virgin Mary, painted in All Weather Exterior blue, fades in the Riverina sun; ‘dangerously adolescent men/in wet sucking board-shorts’ bomb into the irrigation canal; a sweat-stained rural Santa hands out packs of Twisties. Under the surface, the insistent pulse of sexuality, an undertow of dread, a glint of subtle menace.
—Tricia Dearborn
Dodds examines the real Australia where the small, flat human incident might disappear in such monstrous immensity, where aliens might choose to pass by—a naturally surreal world. This is a place to band together or be sucked into nightmare and float out into awful space, a place where only the intimacy of human contact keeps us grounded. This is poetry that reads like a novel, the characters alive and waving to us from the page.
—Rhyll McMaster
REVIEWS
“‘Thinning our little herd’, the poem that opens Benjamin Dodds’s first collection, Regulator, is a kind of signal fire. In making strange the common events of farm life, Dodds refreshes and renews what in less deft hands could lean towards triteness and cliché. This poem is a striking gothic anecdote that relocates tradition, internalises rural worries, and externalises this worry into something between panic and paranoia.” GREG MCLAREN, Cordite Poetry Review
“Many poems within Benjamin Dodds’ debut collection take their cue from childhood memories. At the fore of Regulator is the company of family—of parents, brother, nephew, friends and partner—so too are studies in domesticity and of life behind closed doors. In fact, such pieces feel like “close knit poems”.” LIBBY HART, What the Bird Said: Contemporary and International Poetry
