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    Latecomers
    Latecomers
    Latecomers
    Ebook76 pages26 minutes

    Latecomers

    By Jaya Savige

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the prestigious Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Jaya Savige's Latecomers is a first collection of poems by one of Australia's most exciting young poets. Lively, playful, and always intelligent, Savige's poems show an awareness of place, of the inescapability of history, and a personal commitment to the precision of language.
    "The poems in Latecomers go beyond what we take for granted these days in a first collection: refinement of language and cadence, allusiveness, wit. Moving easily through abstract wonders and the streets of the inner city, they return for nourishment to family and 'the Island'—Bribie, its fishing-life and beaches—as a test always of what is native and endures." —David Malouf
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Queensland Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2005
    ISBN9780702241314
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      Book preview

      Latecomers - Jaya Savige

      occurred

      I

      The Unofficial History Pavilion

      Desires are already memories

      I have come to expect

      too much of the ocean.

      The tide is out again

      researching the month.

      Somewhere to the north

      lies a heart-shaped reef –

      here, a scarab mid-hegira

      from its burning island home

      clutches in death

      a charred Banksia leaf,

      bloated and afloat only because

      of its legs’ grim marriage

      with the leaf’s serrated edge.

      And now I recognise

      in its tough, unprisable grip,

      the grasp and clutch and grab

      and quip of everyone

      who’s ever known

      what it means to not let

      go the only thing to come

      their way amid the salt scrim

      and vicious sprint of the wind.

      A union then, with leaves and other

      small commuters on the gust

      of some apparent consequence;

      for, what we seek to hold to

      when the world has

      loosed its hold on us

      may be what prevents us

      from never having been.

      So the wind discloses

      what we cannot relinquish,

      even in death, then carries us

      from our hearths to foreign beaches,

      there to hit upon what each we must,

      what it means to be alone, at last –

      even if only another island in the bay?

      Sadness comes in a wave:

      the ocean has no

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