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Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris
Adrienne Eberhard
Book Description I caught
a glimpse of satin shoes paler than pearl shell softer than the skin at a lover’s wrist think of a woman’s body all the pinks that glow and suffuse a palette of rouge the hues of dawn and sunset of ardent and replete Adrienne Eberhard’s new collection Chasing Marie Antoinette all Over Paris forges connections between past and present, public and private, and human and non-human, exploring what it means to be truly at home in the world, whether her beloved Tasmania, France or Indonesia. Ranging in subject matter from native grasses, ducklings and footy games, to cave paintings, family and 9000 years-deep ancestry, she draws on personal, as well as cultural, history to investigate possibility, love and loss. With their focus on the small and the precious, these poems draw our attention to what is often overlooked, enabling us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. She demonstrates how well she can move from sensual evocation of place to tenderness and love of the human. This is a book whose language, because of its precision and sensuality, does justice to a wide range of experiences. Eberhard’s poems seem expounded wholly from both body and spirit. Judith Beveridge, Westerly ISBN 9780648038757 2020 110 pgs $24.00 Australia |
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REVIEWSREVIEW by Geoff Page by Adrienne Eberhard. Black
Pepper,
$24. Adrienne Eberhard's fifth collection, Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris, is a convenient reminder of what a strong tradition of female poetry Tasmania has had over the years. tiny shoes with pearl buttons there were lilies / spilling like footsteps silken each one a stab of paint a fall and you nowhere to be seen. Part III is also
remarkable for that relative rarity, a high-quality, explicitly-religious
contemporary poem, In "Christmas Eve" the poet appears to be
watching her husband, at a Parisian Christmas mass, accept: the wafer containing the compression of centuries, and in the lifting voices spilling with the organ's swelling magnitude, he is caught, pinned like a butterfly, his blue eyes catching mine as he swallows. For this reader, the
emotional core of the book is in the opening sequence of its final section
which, from a series of photographs, evokes the life and marriage of her
Dutch grandfather and his Dutch-Indies wife. Her pliancy ironed out in him, into the sharp angles of shirt, collar, pocket, the only concession the buttonhole spray with its tiny white pods that could be embroidery on a lace veil. |
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