The mostly prose poems in Luke Beesley’s In the Photograph play within the landscape created by the divergences between our perception and interpretation of the world and the world itself. Often dismissed or left unnoticed among the routine travails of daily life, In the Photograph places these divergences at life’s very center. Found in dreams, distractions, mishearings, misunderstandings and false assumptions, these divergences are sometimes surreal and benign, other times banal and pernicious, but always they exert an influence over our lives, to shape (or misshape) our sense of reality. As the poet writes in “Time Piece”:
“And who is we? When you drive in towards a valley town, morning, and the light is still settling itself, purple. When the sun is stretching to the chrome, acting on an orgin-yellow, or orange, is when you begin to know a collective. But then again, often, that frisson, cinematic, is not quite the location of the town anyway. Just a collection of trees by a river—a fleeting battery-powered elegance, but you have moved on by then and shaped your life around it.”
In the Photograph (Giramondo, 2023) is Luke Beesley’s fourth collection of poems. You can read a previous post on his poetry here.
In the Corner
One evening in the corner of my eye reading in the lounge room on
our newly upholstered chair there was a rat. It took some time, a
second, for it to come into shape: mangy, artless. I trusted it was a
discarded sock or even one of my son’s shoes, before it twisted and
flattened-all in one motion-and slipped under the door.
First, I threw my thoughts against a broom leaning on a speaker,
then I went into the kitchen for a dustpan, then bathroom for a
toothbrush or eyelash curler, beard trimmer blade-brush, etc., but
eventually I dabbed at the corner with the tip of my pinky finger.
Sunscreen squeezed on a plate. Gerhard Richter walking his paint
across the canvas. This all before I looked under the oven and
found evidence torn variously and sourly; repugnant, the scent:
hot inner-sole of a runner.
While You Were Sleeping
I can feel a thin-very thin-transparent chute billow at the centre
of my chest. It’s a webbed flutter, electric, and I put the blinker on,
overtake a small Toyota.
Go to Source
Author: Thomas Moody
