Ordinary life in perfect proportions.(Avenues and Runways)(Book Review)

Avenues & Runways, by Aidan Coleman; Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005, $22.95.

THE GREAT STRENGTHS of Avenues & Runways, the debut collection of young South Australian poet Aidan Coleman (b. 1976), are its relative simplicity, directness and what one might call the purity or innocence of its vision:

 
   you don't need a big backyard 
   for sun: a deckchair 
   and a lemon tree, its pockets bulging. 

"Movement requires a rock," Patrick White observes in The Aunt's Story, and sun, Coleman says in a similar vein, requires whatever is at hand. You don't need a big backyard for sun any more than you need a big subject for poetry, a big linguistic range or a complex poetic form; rather, as Coleman proves again and again throughout this remarkable book, it can be enough to arrange and re-arrange the simple facts of material existence around an engaged and generous spirit.

The lines quoted above, taken from the book's first poem, "Sun in Winter", are characteristic of the poet's fascination with the interaction of sunlight and space, a theme to which his sparse, precise language perfectly conforms. The winter sun is first contained in the bedroom, a "drawer / of sun", and finally trapped in the backyard. The act of observation becomes an act of all-embracing union with the thing observed, such that the space in which sunlight is contained stands, as it were, for the space of the poem, and the lemon tree and deckchair for all those things that can inspire one to write.

The book closes with a similar piece, "Cat in Empty Aviary", which also plays with notions of light and space, transcendence and immanence. In this poem, however, the poet celebrates the sun as container rather than contained. Here the clouds are like popcorn, and the cat in the empty aviary, from which the speaker learns "idleness and bliss", is "a prisoner of nothing but sun". Like the interplay of sunlight and shade in these poems, melancholy dances with joy throughout this collection, which celebrates subjects as ordinary as life in a student house, marriage, suburbia, the natural world and prayer.

While Coleman's style is humble and unassuming, he is a brave poet, because he works in the sort of minimalist forms exploited by so many and used effectively by so few, and he takes the kinds of risks of which fashionable "language poets" (is there another kind?) can only dream of. Learning "idleness and bliss", he is able to give himself freely to the pure joy of an image, and is never embarrassed to sing the simple pleasures of life. For example, of an evening he observes that a garden sprinkler "chops the night into cool slices"; of a morning he opines that 6 a.m. is the "hour that's closest / to the breath of God"; while in "For My Shower" he exclaims: