Winner, 2014 IP Rolling Picks Best Poetry
B N Oakman finds poetry in the ordinary, the exotic, the political and the aesthetic. No head of State or classical film is safe from his exacting eye, which yields refreshing insights about subjects we thought we already understood.
A poet for the journey rather than the arrival, Oakman blends intellect, heart and imagination in sharply observed verse employing the rhythms of everyday speech with a conversational tone devoid of sentimentality. He eschews distracting detail, embellishment and pointless abstractions, to usher his readers towards closing lines frequently of startling impact. If this book has a leitmotif it might be distilled from the poetry of Antonio Machado, the great Spanish poet whose life and work are referenced here and there throughout Second Thoughts. Oakman is plainly sympathetic to Machado’s credo: Wayfarer, your footsteps/ are the road and nothing more./ Wayfarer, there is no road,/ the road is made by walking. Oakman’s writing, recently described by a prominent critic as ‘radically comprehensible’, is a poetry of engagement which embraces a wide range of subjects – political, personal, cinema, art, war – always encouraging the reader to share an experience, an idea, an emotion.
One measure of a poet’s dedication to the art form to ask how many poems have been published elsewhere prior to their presentation in book form. Oakman mentions in his acknowledgements that all but one of the 51 poems in this collection have been previously published in various magazines, journals and newspapers which include many of the most sought after literary publications in Australia and overseas. The exception is the title poem – and we can only speculate he reserved it for this book.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Oakman writes poems for those annoyed by poets. These are honest stories drawn from history, sometimes the personal, more often the sweep of the world beyond, with an even-handed empathy for the subject of each telling. Resisting the florid and the abstract, Oakman drives directly at the point, with here and there a verse like Incan stonework, so carefully composed you barely see the joins.
– Geoff Lemon, Editor, Going Down Swinging
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
There is a gentle, but occasionally disconcerting, power in all Bruce Oakman’s poetry. He has an extraordinary talent for revealing and confronting us with aspects of reality about which we are either unaware, or tend to ignore. His poems are filled with surprises, sometimes making us smile, but the unexpected distilled truths he uncovers about ourselves and the world in which we live, can leave us weak and trembling, but always wanting more.
– Peter Cundall, Peter Cundall Reads War Poetry
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Bruce Oakman’s writing grows ever more robust and compassionate. He goes to the centre of things, drawing on both past and present as he creates landscapes of feeling in poems in which history, politics, people and places are refracted through a deeply felt understanding of the human condition. With a vision committed to looking at things straight, these are poems from the heart.
– Valerie Krips, Editor, Arena Magazine
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
My favorite film is probably Brief Encounter, and it’s lovely to find it here as the focus of Bruce Oakman’s title poem in this collection: a collection of not just second but infinitely reconsidered thoughts on all the major themes of life and literature; a succession of brief encounters with a rich, and enriching, array of people, places, passions. 51 compact poems encompass whole worlds of emotion and experience, from hospital beds to hilltop towns in Spain, politics to prisons, films to the footy field, each freshly fashioned to prompt our own thoughts and second thoughts.
– Ian Britain, former editor Meanjin
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Oakman’s poetry moves deftly, but no less aptly, between the commonplace and the insightful, the particular and the universal. Moments of frolic are shot through with wisdom, as elsewhere a purposeful ruggedness leads on to refinement. So many poems are distinguished by their final line: demonstrations of organic closure – conceptually retroactive, forceful yet elegant.
– John Flaus, actor and critic