David Ades – A Blink Of Time’s Eye

The delicate, nuanced lines of David Adès’ poetry weaves coherence from an incoherent world. Always, this poetry, in its various unveilings of the deeper levels of self, has the ring of authenticity, of experience bitter and wonderful. A Blink in Time’s Eye is a very impressive collection.

David’s poetry has always been concerned with timeless moments, the frozen frames that compose our lives. In A Blink of Time’s Eye, he has brought together poems of family and memory, reflection and wondering, undercut with longing and grief and the strangeness of the normal. These are poems which should be read in moments of uncertainty and doubt because the poet has found his way out of those dark places with the torchlight of his poetry, and the reader will too.

Like Walt Whitman’s songs, these poems are imbued with candour, long cadences and rhetorical segues that are beguiling, sombre, and insistent. David Adès is the gossamer chronicler of a temporal malaise. In A Blink of Time’s Eye, he turns his consciousness into a subject of formal inquiry as he questions not what do we believe in times of moral collapse, but how?

“so many worlds residing within us,
the books of our lives full of secrets.”

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© David Adès

David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal.  His next collection, The Heart’s Lush Gardens, is forthcoming from Flying Island Books. David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMBjlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.