A Blink of Time’s Eye by David Adès, 5 Islands Press 2025, was launched by Michael Campbell on 14th December 2025 at Benledi House, Glebe, NSW

My deepest thanks to you David for the honour of inviting me to launch A Blink of Time’s Eye published by Five Islands Press. I begin by acknowledging the unceded land on which we gather, the land of the Gadigal people and pay my respects to Elders, past and present.

I don’t launch many books. I can probably count the ones I have agreed to launch on one hand. I have been asked many, many times, but my usual approach is to deflect and suggest who would be a much better, and more appropriate, person. But I have known David for eight years and have watched and enjoyed his many conversations with poets as part of WestWords collaboration with him on Poets Corner – how could I say no?

The journey that brings a book to fruition is a long one. It begins with the mere whiff of an idea, almost too ephemeral to catch, and in the end becomes a collaboration with editors, publishers, artists, designers, distributors, publicists and booksellers. There are choices to be made – including the all-important cover image – because the cliché that you can’t judge a book by its cover simply isn’t true – the cover image frames and informs every reader’s approach to what they will encounter when they open up its pages.

With all of this in mind publishing becomes a collective act of risk but no more so than the poet who has made themselves fully and completely vulnerable. Seen in this way the birth of a book is first and foremost an act of bravery – a ‘big’ moment, that should be recognised as such.

In agreeing to launch A Blink of Time’s Eye I feel very daunted, very nervous, as to whether I can live up to the faith that David has placed in me, and I hope I can give this moment the touch of both lightness and gravitas that characterises his poetry.

As I picked up A Blink of Time’s Eye for the first time I was struck by the immediacy of its cover – Lesley Adès’ extraordinary oil and beeswax work ‘longing for place’. The richness of its colours, the almost expressionistic vibrancy of life that is tempered by the gentleness of closed eyes and lips, gave me the way into David’s collection.

*

I am not a poet. So many launches of poetry collections are given by fellow poets and academics who will tell you:

• what the collection is – it is a ‘deeply poignant’ collection, a ‘visionary work’ …
• what to expect – they will give you a profound discussion of its themes and philosophical approach. And they will contextualise and situate the work in the canon …
• they will tell you how to interpret the work, from ‘someone who knows’ …
• and they will offer up an erudite analysis of the craft.

But I can’t do that. As I say I am not a poet, nor am I an academic, I am a reader.

But what I can offer is a highly personal response to the act of one human exposing their humanity through words on a page, to another, who has read those words, taken them into his soul and has allowed the poetry to resonate within them.

And I believe that this is what A Blink of Time’s Eye is asking of me – to become as vulnerable, as human, as David is on the page. And I am being asked, as a reader, to bring myself, with the same level of humility, generosity and understanding that David is as a human being.

The collection begins:

………………………………………………………………………..…-language

fails me here, the chasm between a story lived and a story told.

 And continues with a promise:

…………………………..…I will unclench, uncurl,

I will unlock all the locks to the vault of my heart,

unfurl it until it is fully open, bright as a sunflower.
Such is my life after death. Like this flower I will bear witness.

 –  ‘Going On’

He says he is :

sifting for meanings still, following clues
…………I have appointed myself detective to my own life

…………………….and am busy tracking down motivations,
…………fears, agendas – all those fingerprints of behaviour.

 – ‘Today’s Weather’

And indeed, this is a hallmark of the collection–each poem is a search for meaning. Each moment is at once an investigation into, and questioning of, the self and its relationship to its existence within time, and the transience and uncertainty of life.

Trying to live in each moment,
so laden with baggage of moments past,
I find they pass too fast and are gone
before I have appraised them.

the way life is constantly vanishing,
personal history just footprints disappearing
behind you as you walk, that all
the holding on cannot save.

 –  ‘A World unto Herself’

Over and over again as I journeyed through the collection I found myself at once being propelled forward, and pulled back into memory, and to an understanding that the past, present and the spectre of the future lives resounds not only in the blink of the eye but as a continuum of time that is not linear but curls in on itself to create simple, and at once complex, contradictory moments of realisation, reflection and truth.

As I read, each poem layered itself onto the preceding one, endings became beginnings as I traversed backwards and forwards.

There are poems here that speak to the longing for relationship and connectedness: To the man he once was, the man he is, and what lies beyond knowing.

Going back again and again
to the place from which he came,

the place so remembered
his body still feels its ache

remembered in less and less detail,
more as a warmth, a broken spell,

the smell of his mother’s cooking,
the age of dreams and mist

he finds it changed and changed again
as he is changed.

 – ‘He Waves Now Farewell’

There are poems of deep and profound love–for lovers, partners, friends and his children.

Lifting my little girl in the darkness of my room,

…

she is buttermilk sweet, she is sleepy warm,

…

… I fell asleep in the back seat of my father’s car,
nights driving around looking at Christmas tree lights
or visiting relatives in Klemzig, nights when

I was overtaken by sleep, to feel myself lifted gently
into my father’s arms, strong then, embracing,
letting me yield into them as into slumber,

feeling at home in the world, loved, protected
that was where I belonged, feeling a long-lost bliss
that I wish my girl will one day remember like this.

 –  ‘Lifting My Little Girl in the Darkness of My Room’

 ***

There, at the last, after the wine, the champagne,

after the clinking glasses, the toasts,
the merry interchange of voices,

the sky darkens, one after another slips away 

following secret paths to where each alone must go,
the noise diminishes save for the sea’s restless roar,

the wind’s gusty breaths, the sound of every word

being unspoken, every promise annulled,
and behind you the great shadow of every grief

is set free, departing like a holed balloon,

and you are both weight and lightness together,
waiting on the shore where the boat will come,

there, at the last, when there is no one but you.

 –  ‘There, at the Last’

David reveals that love becomes manifest in the communion of body and spirit, and in its absence and loss.

 Within the gentle delicacy of David’s poetic craft the images he creates become almost terrifying in their simplicity and profundity.

The late afternoon lies languid on its beach of clouds.

There is honey in the breeze, a rumour of rain,
And the ocean of the night has not yet found its harbour.

I think of bees by their absence, of what will happen

When they find secret homes for their hives,
Their honeycombs when their buzz departs the world.

 – ‘The Late Afternoon Lies Languid’

There is no shying away from the darkness within but as I read, the threads of grief, sadness and desolation are woven into the beauty and wonder of human experience–and I breathed again with David’s acceptance and recognition that he is

………………. . one of the lucky ones

Who can pluck the harp of gratitude,
Celestial notes hanging in the air,

Sublime as my daughter’s violin playing

 – ‘Making My Way’

And as I reached the end of my reading, and re-reading, I was left with my life, as David puts it:

Floating light as [a] windswept dandelion.

 Thank you David.

 – Michael Campbell

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