POETRY SPOTLIGHT: 'Diagram & Leaf' by Aidan Coleman

This week's poetry spotlight shines on Aidan Coleman's 'Diagram & Leaf', from his recently published collection Mount Sumptuous.

'This is an outstanding volume of poetry. It is wonderfully original and deliciously complex. Its intellectual pirouettes and cutbacks are a pleasure to follow, always offering an incredibly agile and aesthetically stimulating journey.' – Lachlan Brown

Post written by Maddy Sexton

This week's feature poem is an interesting one to me, and I hope to others too. I find that, when tasked with choosing a poem to feature, I tend to gravitate towards poems and poetry that read like lullabies – soft and quiet words that I find less daunting when it comes to the tricky task of writing about them.
This week, I decided to branch out a little and choose a poem from a collection that I hadn't picked up before. Eventually, I picked up Aidan Coleman's Mount Sumptuous, a collection of poems that I initially found quite daunting. After reading the book from cover to cover, and then re-reading some of the poems, I found myself agreeing with Geoff Page of the Canberra Times:

Now in his third collection, Mount Sumptuous, his poems are more like small, intricate machines, the purpose of which is not immediately obvious. ... They definitely require (and justify) more than one reading.

The first time I read this week's feature poem, I found it a little strange, the imagery almost threatening. On the second read, I found myself able to see Adelaide itself reflected in the poem, imagining the turned out pockets of the poem's streets to be reminiscent of the inner-city's hidden alleys and side streets. The third time round, it seemed almost to be a love note to a city that has secrets it can't quite remember, filled with people and things moving both too quickly and slowly for it to catch up to.
As someone who is still getting used to poetry (I still frown at the mention of a sonnet after a particularly difficult high school English exam), it was refreshing to find that I was able to 'crack' a poem I would usually have passed over. Isn't it funny how taking a second look at something reveals secrets you'd missed the first time round? Perhaps I should give sonnets another go.

Diagram & Leaf

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Aidan Coleman has worked as a teacher, lecturer and speechwriter, and is the co-author of a series of Shakespeare textbooks. His first poetry collection, Avenues and Runways, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize and his second, Asymmetry, was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards. He is a Member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.
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