Primitive Cartography

by Paul Summers

Paul Summers moved with his wife and their two young children from Tyneside to Queensland, Australia. Exchanging the cold North-east for bougainvillea, kookaburras and cane toads, Summers started mapping the emotional geography of his new world. The result is primitive cartography, a book about living under strange stars and learning the language of sunlight. Summers may have shifted hemispheres and changed the colours of his palette but he is still a deft and faithful documentarist of people and place, of the intimacies and tensions of their off-camera dramas. These poems are dispatches from a new continent charting the terrain of adventure; painterly but politicized, fierce but tender and always with a healthy nod to History.

100 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2013