Asymmetry

CColeman’s images are lightning flashes. With lucid spareness this powerful collection contains beautiful, and sometimes shocking, poetry. The poems vividly and movingly trace experiences inconceivable to most: losing and then fighting to regain mind, movement, voice, words. It is emotional, but always controlled.This fearful experience, and Coleman’s expression of it, drives the collection; then, the collection opens out into the beauty and immediacy of his sequence of remarkable love poems. In the words of Peter Goldsworthy: What greater challenge for a poet than the recovery of language after its loss? These dense, powerful poems are the fruits of Coleman’s year-long struggle. They read like some profound and moving metaphor for the process of writing poetry itself, but on a far more important plane, as we follow him from struck muteness to the dredging up of the bare bones of language, a process of reclamation that seems to find its fullest and most joyous expression - its cure - in the sensuous love poems for his wife that conclude the book, the wife who was at his side every painful inch of the way.