Archipelago

by Adam Aitken

His most personal poetry to date, Adam Aitken's Archipelago is entirely preoccupied with the experience of living and marrying in France. Much of it written while resident at the Keesing Studio in Paris, and then in the south during a seriously cold spring, many of the poems deal with art, Romantic and Modernist writing and writers, and concepts of nostalgia, spirituality, revolution and resistance. One key question is what France (and Europe generally) mean to an Australian writer, which leads the poet to consider the 'French inspired' work of other Australian writers. At a simpler level, the collection attempts to weigh cosmopolitan culture against that of its fictive semi-rural France, where the poet asks how we might reconcile isolation with social engagement, conservative values with more outward looking perspectives? Adopting the lens of those who live there, Aitken reflects on the region's Gallo-Roman history, its myths, its communal virtues and constraints, its weather, and on the threats to its ecology. Adam Aitken is a poet and non-fiction writer who was born in London and now lives in Sydney. He spent his early childhood in Thailand and Malaysia, before settling in Sydney. He is the author of four full length collections of poetry and a PhD thesis on the Asian Imaginary in Australian literature. He was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, and Poet in Residence at the Keesing Studio in Paris. He co-edited the contemporary Asian Australian Poets anthology (Puncher & Wattmann) in 2013. His memoir One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Press) was published in 2016. He studies French at the Alliance FranCaise in Sydney.

98 pages, Paperback

Published July 3, 2017

About the author

Adam Aitken is a poet, memoirist, academic and editor (with Kim Cheng Boey and Michelle Cahill) of Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann 2013). his most recent book is 100 Letters Home from Vagabond Press.

His work appears in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Jacket2, Southerly, and in Life Writing.

He is a writing analyst at the University of Technology, Sydney.

“In a recent outing with Aitken, you can find “The Hybrid Vigor Institute is dedicated/ to stimulating unconventional/ thinking and/ unexpected discoveries . . .” and the subsequent warning that “To one like you, who cannot access it, you/ may perceive it only as light.” Beware the refrain of ‘hybridity’, reader, don’t whole this pigeon till it’s cooked.”
—Michael Brennan: Poetry International Web

Born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and a Thai mother, Adam spent his childhood in South-east Asia, before migrating to Australia where he graduated from the University of Sydney in 1982. In 1982 he spent six months living with his relatives and learning Thai in Bangkok. He was a co-editor of the poetry magazine P76, named after a failed Leyland car model, and for a time was associate poetry editor for Heat magazine. He has traveled widely, visiting Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia; his experiences overseas continue to inform his poetry.

Aitken published his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo, in 1985. He has since published five further poetry collections, and his poems and short fiction have also been published widely in anthologies and literary journals. For some years he has taught narrative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.

In 2006 he obtained a PhD in creative writing. In 2010 he was the Visiting Distinguished Writer at University of Hawai’i, Manoa. His poetry and prose have been widely anthologized. His words are also immortalized in bronze on the Avenue of Nations sculpture at Centennial Park, Sydney. His most recent books of poetry are Eighth Habitation, which was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Award, and Tonto’s Revenge, (Tinfish Press, Hawai’i). In 2012 he was resident at the Australia Council’s Keesing Studio, Paris, and in Southern France, where he spent six months learning French and completing new work.