Published 2023. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848619081 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
" On the one hand, a palpable, bodily hunger for foreign sights and sounds, for the touch of a foreign hand; on the other, an uneasy sense that he is null, empty, a vehicle being used by a poet-being from another realm (strongest candidate: Fernando Pessoa). This underlying tension does nothing to vitiate the strikingly vivid quality of John Mateer’s visits to destinations high and low across the globe, on journeys which are at the same time explorations of the deeper self. " —JM Coetzee
Focusing on experiences of dislocation and on the importance of image and translation, That Nostalgia
records Mateer's travels and his witnessing of the inequities and pleasures of life in many parts of the world, from China and Japan, South-East Asia and Türkiye, through Portugal, and then, further west, to Mexico and the USA. Central to his poetics is an awareness of the artifice of the Imperial, or, as he coins it, “Empire, that Nostalgia”. As the first European power to lose its global empire, Portugal plays a special role in Mateer's imagination; with its continuing connections to Asia and Africa, and its own cosmopolitan life led among the ruins. Having spent his youth in South Africa, Mateer's sensitivity to politics in all its forms allows him to make of that nostalgia various kinds of irony through which he can carefully observe the present world. Throughout the work he is attentive, not only to language itself, but also to its internalized practices, cultural and spiritual. That Nostalgia
is more personal than Unbelievers, or 'The Moor'
and more historically engaged than Jo
ão: (sonnets)
. Its invitation to readers is to have them question their own subjectivity, their own unknowing, to reconsider the elusiveness of deep experience in a vast, often chaotic, contemporary world. The book collects poems written between 1995 and 2016, uniting work from publications that have appeared in Australia, Portugal, Macau, Sumatra, Japan, South Africa and the UK, most now out-of-print and rare, and it does not include work from the other Shearsman books.
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