Object Permanence

by Toby Fitch

The selected calligrammes of Toby Fitch’s Object Permanence, collected here in a special full-colour edition, represent more than a decade of experimentation with shape poetry. While Fitch writes in many forms, the calligramme has become his signature, much as it was for Apollinaire, but this time readymade for the twenty-first century’s hyperlinked modes of affect, translation and subjectivity. Object Permanence gestures beyond technopaignia (“games of skill”) toward the forms of human existence on this planet, the ways we shape and are shaped by our world.

“Toby Fitch is one of a handful of poets rejuvenating the possibilities of visual poetry in Australia. As poems of Tradition, Fitch’s calligrammes don’t just remember poems and topoi, they remember actual pages. We love our black and white poetry world as cool as a movie, and you’ll find that world here — but you’ll also find the excitements of stepping out of that world into the colours of another reality. The poems show you how.” — Michael Farrell

56 pages, Paperback

Published October 8, 2019

About the author

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (2019), Sydney Spleen (2021) and Object Permanence: Calligrammes (2022). He lives on unceded Gadigal land.