Fire in the Afternoon
Life in a city by water
Fire in the afternoon, Sydney Australia, published by Halstead Press, 2014
…"potent in every sense of the word: brave, expansive, mythic, epigrammatic, deeply empathetic and quietly unrelenting" Judy Johnson
…"John Stokes is a poet of light and water and the sound of women's cries. He has a thing for the Australian landscape" Kate Llewellyn
Launch speech by the author at Gleebooks, Sydney, 2014:
We are sending this book on its journey tonight, largely, one might say, naked of theory.
In some ways this is a simple book; elemental. But be wary: it bites.
The purpose of its being is to intrigue you, bring you along on its journey
The book is about love, sex and chaos.
My first and greatest hope is that you, the listeners and future readers, will share the dreams, experience the passions, which are universal and yet particular in this small corner of the world.
I have been in Europe just lately and had thought the passions; the history; the statues without heads; were more violent there. The smell of water on stone walls older. The glitter of light on water somehow more full of beautiful melancholy.
But of course this is not true. The passions, the imaginings in this country are the same. When you read the book you will find the ground we feel under our feet is older. Time is the same but different. In certain parts we are in fact drifting into late Autumn as I am speaking to you now.
You will see in this book that, like in a play, the characters will speak sometimes the truth, sometimes lies, sometimes in self-delusion. But always they will be true.
People will live and die in love, in despair, in joy, in the midst of the chaos that has become our world these nights.
Every poem or piece of prose is its own world to be entered into, but they come together to make a story. And you will be the hero or heroine of the tale.
The book is about real things, real happenings as actually experienced or reliably reported.
I hope you will come to know the emotion of silent things; action and memory pushed into a single day, of what we are pleased to call real time.
Above all, I hope you find this book lives for you, that it speaks to you in PLAIN LANGUAGE. This is the start of a one-person campaign to show the emotional heights and depths can be set in the common tongue. The New Art I am calling it. I think we are all ready for this.
I work hard to make every word mean a crowd of things; to invest the poems with energy and emotion, and then, when certain ones squeal, strip them down again until the bones show; the intensity comes; until they are worth reading.
This goes also for what are called in the book, “perspectives”:- what we might call “miniature essays” on the text, except they are more poems than essays; they are prose pieces given to you like a final commentary front-of-stage, as it were.
And then there are the wonderful “postscripts”. By Kate Llewellyn and Marion Halligan. I reckon they are worth reading for themselves.
I hope you will find in this book, something that challenges you. That moves you. That leads you far up dark alleys but, finally, leads you out again.
From Fire in the afternoon:
1. The Strange case of the drowned goldfish
A strange time
we had of it, that year:-
the sky turning blood red like that…
Soldiers left their death desks
to walk through snowfalls of cockies
come into town
Foxes came down
out of the pine trees
to bite the dogs’ tails
Young wives, in tears,
cried out in fear
in their husbands’ ears…
…"potent in every sense of the word: brave, expansive, mythic, epigrammatic, deeply empathetic and quietly unrelenting" Judy Johnson
…"John Stokes is a poet of light and water and the sound of women's cries. He has a thing for the Australian landscape" Kate Llewellyn
Launch speech by the author at Gleebooks, Sydney, 2014:
We are sending this book on its journey tonight, largely, one might say, naked of theory.
In some ways this is a simple book; elemental. But be wary: it bites.
The purpose of its being is to intrigue you, bring you along on its journey
The book is about love, sex and chaos.
My first and greatest hope is that you, the listeners and future readers, will share the dreams, experience the passions, which are universal and yet particular in this small corner of the world.
I have been in Europe just lately and had thought the passions; the history; the statues without heads; were more violent there. The smell of water on stone walls older. The glitter of light on water somehow more full of beautiful melancholy.
But of course this is not true. The passions, the imaginings in this country are the same. When you read the book you will find the ground we feel under our feet is older. Time is the same but different. In certain parts we are in fact drifting into late Autumn as I am speaking to you now.
You will see in this book that, like in a play, the characters will speak sometimes the truth, sometimes lies, sometimes in self-delusion. But always they will be true.
People will live and die in love, in despair, in joy, in the midst of the chaos that has become our world these nights.
Every poem or piece of prose is its own world to be entered into, but they come together to make a story. And you will be the hero or heroine of the tale.
The book is about real things, real happenings as actually experienced or reliably reported.
I hope you will come to know the emotion of silent things; action and memory pushed into a single day, of what we are pleased to call real time.
Above all, I hope you find this book lives for you, that it speaks to you in PLAIN LANGUAGE. This is the start of a one-person campaign to show the emotional heights and depths can be set in the common tongue. The New Art I am calling it. I think we are all ready for this.
I work hard to make every word mean a crowd of things; to invest the poems with energy and emotion, and then, when certain ones squeal, strip them down again until the bones show; the intensity comes; until they are worth reading.
This goes also for what are called in the book, “perspectives”:- what we might call “miniature essays” on the text, except they are more poems than essays; they are prose pieces given to you like a final commentary front-of-stage, as it were.
And then there are the wonderful “postscripts”. By Kate Llewellyn and Marion Halligan. I reckon they are worth reading for themselves.
I hope you will find in this book, something that challenges you. That moves you. That leads you far up dark alleys but, finally, leads you out again.
From Fire in the afternoon:
1. The Strange case of the drowned goldfish
A strange time
we had of it, that year:-
the sky turning blood red like that…
Soldiers left their death desks
to walk through snowfalls of cockies
come into town
Foxes came down
out of the pine trees
to bite the dogs’ tails
Young wives, in tears,
cried out in fear
in their husbands’ ears…
