AustLit

‘Freyberg’s sexy landscape is the Kings Cross of queer history; a dream/memoir, sharply observed, calling full blast from an era bulldozed and broken. Liquid with desire, brutal and beautiful, in all the drawn-out tenderness maturity brings.’ - Kerri Shying

‘The Crumbling Mansion really rips down the page. It’s a series of interrelated snapshots and vignettes that read like mini chapters in a verse novella. The poems are tactile and visceral and conjure well a scene: the crumbling mansion is a gothic pile of many rooms - art, wine, philosophy and music; a burgeoning, blossoming, sweaty, yearning sexuality and desire for long denied and luridly painted fruit. There’s the shadow of AIDS and the shadow of fathers: anxiety and a desperate desire to fill an identity and madly misspend a lost youth.

'Underpinning it all is the grounding respite and hope of art, and the salvation and identity to be found in artistic creation. There are also some delicate and finely painted pieces of the natural world.’ - Tug Dumbly'

Source : publication summary

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'Charles Freyberg entices us into a midnight world where passion brings both rapture and peril. Like Kenneth Slessor, Dorothy Hewitt and Michael Dransfield, he portrays the creative denizens of Kings Cross after dark with lyrical poems mourning the devastation wrought by addiction, plague and madness.' - Lou Steer

''Freyberg treads the page with all the notes of Callas at La Scala. His characters are angel boys wrestling with gargoyles, in their cries we hear Chelsea Manning's lyric of injustice, the stillness of a goanna in the noon sun, and the sound of waves beating at the bodies of our past. A daring collection, wide-eyed with hope and love.' - Rico Craig

''In Charles Freyberg's dislocated world we "gather cracks" in life's journey that demand both attention and love. In Dining at the Edge, we are confronted by scenarios of loss and degradation but also a profound joy in art as solace. In the poems there is ambiguity and subtlety as well as intensely realised, high-keyed images that surprise and confront. Freyberg writes through a compelling voice that aches and celebrates - and in this he proclaims the imperatives of love.' - Simeon Kronenberg'  (Publication summary)