Landscapes are created and figures emerge from those landscapes to inhabit them. They are meant to grow from inside and surface gradually. The life-force of the poems – the images, impressions, the archetypal moments – are left to sink even deeper into the unconsciousness.
Each poem has its own theme, meaning, relevancy for being. Each needs to be approached as one would approach a window – not to look out of and see the rotations of life, but to look in, as if one were peering into new spatial worlds. Once read, I would want the reader to walk away and reflect on a poem, then I would expect them to return for more. As a collection, each poem is a story. Whenever I read them, I stand at the window too. I stare in and continue to see new things that weren’t there before. The landscape keeps changing.
Hopefully the reader will feel ‘a definite sense of place in every poem, even when positions shift and people transform’.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
The title poem in Britton’s Liquefaction alludes to the miraculous liquefaction of a saint’s blood in Italy, and in its mode is an elliptical assemblage of rhetorical effects, so that in the end, as an old woman walks beneath the moon, ‘a flock of starlings pecks at her blackness.’ The best of Britton is about such telling perceptions: the rain ‘blowing autumns ecstasies against your windows’. His concern is with classic truths — the flight of time, seizing the moment, the island of the self: ‘You search the mirror for space and brush/ your hair. I squeeze in beside you// beside the sharp corners and wash my face/ in its silver shallows . . .’
– David Eggleton, Landfall