Testimonials are a tricky business.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of publishers plastering lavish praise all over a book’s cover to intice readers into buying it. In fact, said praise usually turns me off. I would much rather browse books with plain packaging, if I’m really honest: although that would of course make judging their contents slightly more difficult.
Look, there’s no easy answer; I guess I just want some restraint.
Anyway, none of that is a really good segue into the real subject of this post, which is the delightful testimonial that Brisbane poet Liam Ferney has penned in honour of Transition Vamps, my third full-length collection of poems, which as of today is available to order via the Cordite Books website.
Liam is a formidable poet. He was also poetry editor for Cordite Poetry Review during its imperial phase, by which I mean the period of time when the journal really hit its stride as a publisher of high-quality, experimental and innovative work by Australian and international poets.
He was the brains behind one of the Cordite’s most creative and groundbreaking issues, Children of Malley (2005), and its inevitable follow-up, Children of Malley II (2010). Both issues showcased poems that interrogated the legacy of one of Australian literature’s most notorious fakes, Ern Malley.
When I contacted Liam to ask if he’d be interested in writing an Introduction to Transvision Vamps, he agreed immediately. “Achievement, as the kids say, unlocked,” he wrote. Well, needless to say, I was flattered. And, now that the Introduction is online, I’m happy to say that it ticks all of the boxes, and then some.
I wasn’t really aware that my use of unclosed brackets – (like this – was a ‘thing’ until Sally Evans pointed it out in a review of my previous collection of poems, Leaves of Glass, which came out way back in 2013. So young! As Sally observed at the time:
. . . this collection shows a resurgence of his characteristic half-bracketing technique, in which numerous parentheses are opened within a piece but never closed. This loss or stripping back of punctuation forces the reader to guess where the proliferating brackets end, and thus grapple with ambiguous readings. That technique has become Prater’s trademark . . .
Liam takes this analysis a step further in his Introduction, pointing out something I never actually knew about brackets:
David Prater’s singular punctuation mark is the parenthesis which Renaissance humanist and theologian Erasmus, an early booster of that particular glyph, dubbed lunulae; translation: little moons. It is a perfectly Praterian coinage that encapsulates the waxing and waning halves intended to quarantine asides or afterthoughts. But in Prater’s work, more often than not, the waning bracket appears without its waxing reflection, fostering ambiguity and opening up a poem’s possibilities . . .
The synchronicities here are, obviously, endless.
Anyway, read the rest for yourself, then get thee to the Cordite Books website and grab a copy of my book of little moons.