Known for their allusiveness and indirection, Bolton’s poems can also be jaw-droppingly direct, as they make their way towards resolutions never clearly within their sights, achieved rather than aimed for. Fantastic Day performs philosophy, history, criticism - all three and satire at the same time, in the dolefully droll Hullo (which considers our literature’s ambitions and its very different fortunes) -parody and sincerity, in a strange mutual bind, in Birds of Rome, which looks at Italy or ‘travel’ while guying the genre ‘travel writing’ and, while doing so, mounts a show of rebellion against New York. Both poems attempt to negotiate with the international canon.
The poems in Fantastic Day set out a range of styles and manners: lyric, fractured, discursive. They are frequently funny, regularly beautiful (see the two poems named after jazz tunes, Star Eyes and Ascension), and masterful in wielding a casual, almost idle precision in the service of thinking - thinking about politics (the Letter to John Forbes, A Saturday), about friendship, about time, even aesthetics. The Letter, initially modelled on Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, treats friendship, time, and a recent Australia - and the same might be said of many of the poems: Briefing Mary Christie, the faux naif account of artist Richard Grayson’s life, the Rousselian simulation of artist Shaun Kirby’s work, or of Vivienne Miller’s. Along the way we meet poems as different as Travellin’ Man and Reach & Ambition. The range is considerable, the unity unmistakeable.
This volume concludes with a remarkable long poem, Wiesengrund, in part a paean to the philosopher Adorno, but as much a dedication to various philosophers and critics (Clement Greenberg, Donald Brook, Cesar Aira, Lucy Lippard) and, in its musical construction, an elegiac account of … what? … history, politics, experience.
