Snail Mail Cursive

by James Walton

Poetry

108 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2023

About the author

James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He has been shortlisted for the ACU National Poetry Prize, the MPU International Poetry Prize, The James Tate Prize, and the Ada Cambridge Prize. Five collections of his poetry have been published. He was nominated for ‘The Best of the Net’ 2019, and was a Pushcart Prize 2021 nominee. He is a winner of the Raw Art Review Chapbook Prize. His fifth poetry collection, Snail Mail Cursive, was published by Ginninderra Press in January 2023. He now resides in Wonthaggi, Australia, in an Edwardian house which was once a small maternity hospital.

Reviews

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, James Walton is like a master butterfly catcher reaching out and pulling from the air the most incandescent words and images. I often find they fly away from me until I can catch them on a second reading. I have discovered with Walton’s poetry you must be prepared to let diverse representations appear as in the panther in these lines from Blow your trumpet, Gabriel:

“where the clouds churn for hail
prepare to scrape calcium
make high cheekbones of panther”

The last lines of this poem are marvellous:

“if you stand into the gale
all it takes is breath”

I’m not sure why but this collection strikes me more as one of places rather than people. There are still people. People being thought about, remembered or lost but for me place stands out - the backdrop of the remembrance as in Farewell by Sea. And oh the beautiful cadence of this stanza:

“from hand to hand the burnished soil passes
cupped by palms conveyed in fist
to finally settle where dry throats breathe
and cake the slow bake of hearts here
held fast before the afternoon’s conviction”

Several poems feature time (time of day, days and months) almost as place - Kilcunda, in the centre of October. Here is a wonderful stanza:

“the trestle bridge is exposed
tide out as far as it goes
the bull kelp c0llapsed
all rolled dragon pieces.”

And more place/time poems: By a window, mid-fall. Inverloch - Cape Paterson Road, late August. Theatre Road at Dusk. And I love the encounter with the kangaroo in Late Winter Sunday Reflection. So many wonderful lines that I wish I had written. From Twelve megawatts to evening:

“the wind turbines

obelisks in need of a pharaoh
sift the sky for a language”

Favourite poems not already mentioned:

I begin to wonder
Place in a Landscape
S.O.S.
Sixty-eights
Snail Mail Cursive
Three hundred and sixty seconds is all it took

A mesmerising collection that I highly recommend.

[Denise O'Hagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Artful yet wise, humorous yet full of a pervasive compassion, the poems in Walton's latest collection explore various facets of the poet’s own life. Meditative in tone and grounded in concrete detail - from blue tongue lizards and dozing ginger cats to cooked chips and graffitied benches - poems are both highly personal and universal in appeal. In short, 'Snail Mail Cursive' is a captivating collection which, once started, is hard to put down.