Writing King Kong

Robert Seatter’s new collection of poems explores the way we write the world, and reinvent it both for our own development and delusion. In a glorious various book Seatter’s subjects range from an elliptical self-help manual to a telephone party line where we become ‘an accidental spy’ on another life, from the ambivalent comfort of a drunken night singing hymns to the elusive proximity of family trees, the recipe for summer pudding as elegy for a lost friend and a mantra of engineering facts (‘Six million hand-driven rivets’) about Sydney Harbour Bridge to comfort a dying father. Along with King Kong, Anton Chekov, Marilyn Monroe and Shakespeare’s comic lovers, the likes of Gershwin, Robinson Crusoe, Ulysses, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers also find their way into this eclectic, multi-voiced collection. In each case, the line between what is real and what is illusory is a burred continuum: not easy, never quite graspable.