That Nostalgia - Softcover

Mateer, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848619081 ISBN 13: 9781848619081

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2023

Synopsis

Focusing on experiences of dislocation and on the importance of image and translation, That Nostalgia records John Mateer's travels and his witnessing of the inequities and pleasures of life in many parts of the world, from China and Japan, South-East Asia and Turkiye, through Portugal, and then, further west, to Mexico and the USA. Central to his poetics is an awareness of the artifice of the Imperial, or, as he coins it, "Empire, that Nostalgia". As the first European power to lose its global empire, Portugal plays a special role in Mateer's imagination; with its continuing connections to Asia and Africa, and its own cosmopolitan life led among the ruins. Having spent his youth in South Africa, Mateer's sensitivity to politics in all its forms allows him to make of that nostalgia various kinds of irony through which he can carefully observe the present world. Throughout the work he is attentive, not only to language itself, but also to its internalized practices, cultural and spiritual. That Nostalgia is more personal than Unbelievers, or 'The Moor' and more historically engaged than Joao: (sonnets). Its invitation to readers is to have them question their own subjectivity, their own unknowing, to reconsider the elusiveness of deep experience in a vast, often chaotic, contemporary world. The book collects poems written between 1995 and 2016, uniting work from publications that have appeared in Australia, Portugal, Macau, Sumatra, Japan, South Africa and the UK, most now out-of-print and rare, and it does not include work from the author's other Shearsman titles.

About this title

About the Author

John Mateer's books and publications have appeared in Australia, South Africa, Portugal, Austria, Macau, Sumatra, Japan and the UK. His work has been translated into European and Asian languages, Farsi and the Portuguese of Brazil. His books, Joao: (sonnets) and Unbelievers, or 'The Moor', were published by Shearsman. Unbelievers, or 'The Moor' has had editions in Vienna, Coimbra and Sydney. Collections of his selected poems are being translated into German and Swedish, with an expanded, translated version of Joao also in preparation. His prose work includes a travelogue on Sumatra, an historically accurate fiction on the origin of the Malays of the Cocos-Keeling Islands and, with a Dutch art-historian, a small book on iconoclasm. He currently resides in Perth/Boorloo, Australia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848619081
• ISBN 13: 9781848619081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190