AustLit

'Imagine that three poems are delivered to your door. They come without note, explanation or sending address. The first is Charles Wright’s ‘Appalachian Book of the Dead’. The second is a fragment called ‘Pilgrimage’, which is the title of section three of John Burnside’s poem ‘Roads’. The third is Kevin Hart’s ‘The River’. You are curious and so you read them. They have strange parallels, all seem attuned to silence. This causes you to recall, for some reason, Paul Valéry’s initial response to Mallarmé’s A Coup des and what he calls ‘the immense question posed by this silence charged with so much life and with so much death’. Yet you read them again and, this time, you are struck by their attention to the world: ‘sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface’ (Wright 3), ‘wind in young boughs’ (Hart 3) ‘the scent of orchards’ (Burnside 22). After, a wisp of Maurice Blanchot ghosts through your mind, carrying with it echoes of Rilke and Heidegger: ‘Man is linked to things, he is in the midst of them.’' (Author's introduction)