Author(s): Martin Langford

Poetry

Ground is a meditation on the evolution and nature of Australian spaces. The collection is governed by the tensions which characterise Langford's work: between the way our spaces are projections of enlargement narratives, and the need to resist them by acknowledging the others with whom we interact. Enlargement narratives place the self at the centre of the world, and share an obsession with a point of arrival which is only meaningful in terms of the story from which it has arisen. Against them, Langford proposes the idea of the dance: by which he means any relationship with another in which neither is privileged-which is based on attention and respect, rather than on the relegation of the other in the face of one's needs. Loosely chronological, the collection begins by locating us within the natural world, and continues with poems about our disjunctive attempts to rationalise the nature of settlement. There are sequences on the nature of Australian silences, on transitional periods in the nation's interior life and on the cultural layering of our suburbs.
One section explores ways in which Australia has been represented, and another explores what Langford nominates as seven of the Sydney seasons. The collection culminates in a title sequence in which our interactions are conceived as dances. Grounded in ideas, this is, nevertheless, a very lyrical poetry. "Profoundly generous and profoundly important poetry...a truly visionary poet." - Andy Kissane "Luminous, full of air and space, wonderfully paced and constructed...a poetry at once tough and musical, a voice assured in its rhythms, a language both exalted and plain, and a mind that can think to the point of revelation within its chosen figures or images." - Judith Beveridge "Here is a poet who convinces us that poetry matters." - Peter Kirkpatrick "The poems put forward what amounts to a poetic worldview with complete commitment at every level-moral, intellectual, emotional, linguistic-and the result is undeniable authority." - Susan Wicks