Author’s photograph by Anne Hensh

David Adès latest collection, The Heart’s Lush Gardens (Flying Island Books, 2024) was recently launched in Sydney. Before the launch Richard James Allen interviewed David about his new book.

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Richard: What are your key aspirations as a writer?

David: That would be telling! Like most writers, I have a bucket list of things I would love to achieve. I would love to be published in Rattle, for example. It is fun to keep trying! I would love to be a more experimental, innovative poet and push boundaries more. I would love, one day, to write a perfect poem! I feel like I have a long way to go to get there. But mostly, I aspire to having credibility as a poet and to have my works read more widely.

Richard: What are your most important achievements thus far?

David: I think my most important achievement was the day I gave myself permission to call myself a poet. That took many years and required me to overcome self-doubt. My next most important achievement was the publication of my first book in 2008 when I was 51. It was a very long time coming, and it made me feel that I was no longer a pretender. I’m very proud of my work as host of the WestWords Poets’ Corner reading and podcast series, which has and will continue to create a wonderful archive of Australian poets reading and talking about their work, and also my involvement with WestWords in making the documentary film Robert Adamson: The Ultimate Commitment.

Richard: When did you start writing this particular book?

David: My process is never to start out writing a book as such. I try to consistently write and publish poems until I have a body of work. In 2020 and 2021, I was fortunate to share a writing residency with three other writers at Don Bank Writers’ Studio. One of my objectives during that residency was to put together a manuscript of works already written. I discovered that I had enough material for several manuscripts, so I worked intermittently in getting them together between January 2020 and April 2023. I first sent out this book to a publisher in April 2023. It contains some poems that were written as long ago as March 2008 and some during the residency, so it spans nearly 15 years.

Richard: What is it about?  (Or what are its themes, etc?)

David: It’s about the heart: anatomically, the heart is just an organ, albeit a marvellous and efficient one, with a vital function to perform. Yet we invest the word ‘heart’ and our concept of it with multiple other meanings some of which are abstract and not well defined. We wear it on our sleeves, it is the centre of things, the heart of the matter. It is, among other things, ‘axiom: gravity well: lightning rod: leitmotif.’ In The Heart’s Lush Gardens I undertake a poetic exploration of the heart, wandering through its gardens, stopping to pause here and there, trying to view it in its multiplicity.

Richard: What is the book’s structure and how did you decide on it?

David: The first step in putting together this book was to decide which poems to include and which to exclude. Once I had that worked out, I toyed with the idea of not having a structure, that is of not doing the usual thing and splitting the book into sections but just having an uninterrupted sequence of poems. I went back and had a look at a bunch of other poetry books to revisit what other poets are doing. In the end I divided the book into three sections because the poems tended to group themselves fairly readily into different strands of thought. The first, titled From Which I Must Always Wake after the poem of that name, which is the first poem of the book, contains extended meditations on aspects of desire, on lust and love and the heart’s navigation of desire generally. The second, titled These Are the Men after the poem of that name is an exploration of being male and of male relationships and ties into the book’s dedication which is to the men in my life and in particular to the men in my men’s group of many years. It was important for me to acknowledge this, because I think men often fail to honour the male relationships in their lives as they should. And the third, titled Ripple, again after a poem of that name, investigates notions of a range of things that disturb or impact us, that make us stop for a moment and consider or wonder or lean into the feelings of the moment.

Richard: Any comments you’d like to make about your approach to literary form?

David: It’s a bit ad hoc and intuitive. I feel like I am sometimes not as concerned with form as I should be. But it is always there, underlying things. There are so many poetic forms to explore, it is like being in a gigantic playground. I love to play with form, with language, with space and structure, with idea. Poetry gives me a lot of opportunity to do that.

Richard: What was the most joyful thing about writing the book?

David: Each poem, when I finally arrive at its final form, is its own joy. And there are different kinds of joy involved: there is the joy of a poem that arrives almost fully formed and requires little alteration. And there is the completely different joy of a poem like From Which I Must Always Wake that had multiple iterations over a number of years before landing in its final form. There is the joy of feeling like you have articulated something in a poem that you are trying to say as well as you can. There is the joy of playing with language in a poem like Flaw Play. And then there is the joy of arranging the poems in sequence, of trying so many alternatives until you arrive at the one that seems to work best, where the poems are not just there for readers to read but are in conversations with each other, where threads run between poems (none of which were originally intended because the poems were not written as a collective but individually). There is the joy for me of discovering unintended connections and resonances between poems and in feeling that the whole becomes something more than its parts.

Richard: What was the most challenging and/or confronting thing?

David: Having Kit Kelen as an editor! But in a good way. It has been so rare for me to have someone of Kit’s stature look at my work and throw things at me about how it might be improved. Before I left Adelaide in 2011 I was part of a poetry workshop group where I could take my poems to be critiqued. And since 2023 in Sydney that has happened again. But in between, I was not part of any group, I worked in isolation, and so nearly all the poems in this book are poems that have not had any critical or editorial input. Kit was the first to cast a critical eye over the work and I am grateful for that. The end result is an improved book. Kit’s most challenging suggestion was that I revisit the ‘abstractions’ in the book and try to make them less prominent. I found that challenging because to an extent that is how I think and how I write and to really respond to that suggestion would have meant a major rewrite of the book. I decided against doing that, but to try to be more conscious of this aspect of my writing when putting together future collections.

Richard: What did you learn about yourself in the process?

David: I’m not sure I learned a lot that was new. It was more about reinforcing things like being more conscious of my abstractions, the need to find a narrative arc in a collection, that I have a long way to go as a poet – I have never rid myself of feeling like a novice. And that’s okay.

Richard: What is the cover imagery and why did you choose it?

David: The cover imagery is a section of a painting by my sister, Lesley. Her artwork was also on the cover of my first book, Mapping the World. I love collaborating with Lesley and will use her artwork on my book covers wherever I can.

Richard: Who took the back cover photo?

David: I’m not exactly sure! Several years ago, I asked the late David Mane, a photographer and friend who had shared a year in Israel with me in 1974, to do a photo shoot of me because I didn’t have any good recent photos. The photoshoot occurred at the annual reunion of the 1974 Australian contingent to Israel which was held at Daylesford, Victoria. Another member of that group, Anne Henshaw, joined David in doing the photo shoot. In the end, I didn’t know who took which photo, but I’ve credited Anne since David’s untimely death a couple of years ago.

Richard: What do you want the reader to take away from this book?

David: I view all poetry as an act or reaching out, as a bridge to connect. I hope that my poetry is accessible and though sometimes personal, that it has a universality that resonates with readers, that the poems spark ideas, thoughts, images, insights, understandings, etc in readers that will make them want to come back and re-read the poems. I want the book to land in homes where it is loved!

Richard: Tell us something about yourself you have never told anyone before…

David: I talk a lot. There is probably nothing I have never told anyone before! And if there is, I’m not telling!

Richard: Any thoughts about your launcher – (i.e. me)?  

David: When I read Richard James Allen’s The Short Story of You and I, and before that Fixing the Broken Nightingale, I felt a kindred poetic spirit, someone whose poems spoke to me in the way I hoped my poems spoke to others. I had the privilege during covid of zoom launching his book, More Lies, and it was inevitable that I would ask him to launch my book! I plan to frame his launch speech.

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Richard James Allen (he/him), is a Gadigal-based poet, filmmaker, actor, dancer and choreographer. Artistic Director of The Physical TV Company, his multi-award-winning work has been screened, broadcast, published and presented on six continents. His thirteenth book, Text Messages from the Universe (Flying Island Books, 2023), reviewed in Rochford Street Review, was a finalist for three international awards.  A film adaptation, also reviewed in Rochford Street Review, won six awards and was a Finalist for Best Narrative Feature Film at the ATOM Awards in Melbourne. A First-Class Honours graduate from Sydney University, he won the Chancellor’s Award for best doctoral thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The Heart’s Lush Gardens by David Adès is available from https://flyingislands pocketpoets.com. au/product/the-hearts- lush-gardens/