‘Forest hill’ positions the poet as amateur detective, and perhaps our more formal historical method could learn something from a poetical approach. While Motion’s nostalgia is relatively recent and personal, his poetry articulates a sense of generational change in terms of understanding ‘the past’, a sense of what’s really driving all those school reunions and ‘facebook realities’.

Despite the nowhere geography of ‘forest hill’ and the vast social networks of the twenty-first century, lollyology is acutely aware of place and the parochial. Location awareness has, paradoxically, become a hallmark of contemporary technology and I often notice that Derek Motion has ‘checked in’ somewhere innocuous and ultra-local, like a truck stop at Jugiong or the Turvey Tops Shopping Centre. Poems in lollyology are more likely to involve road travel than international flights: ‘with such fitful poise I’d grace/any maccas carpark’ (‘Invasion’). Here the poet seems to dismiss any real sense of historical engagement as a tourist: ‘suffice to say I’d play up the history of a place – as if/ active agency were involved’ (Invasion). But our sense of place doesn’t only involve space and the present, it’s also practiced over time. There is, in one of the final poems, ‘Learning about explorers’, a sense of Wagga’s postcolonial landscape: ‘A clear spot amongst/controlled weeds. Wiradjuri in a disembodied tyre’.

Lollyology is a revised version of Motion’s doctoral thesis and there is something to be said for its timely release after the long haul of a PhD. His decision to self-publish with Lulu is one that I applaud, a decision that positions his book as an extension of his on-line publication practice rather than a more formal departure. I am glad to have a partial literacy into its references, the texture of its language, and its nostalgia, while commending it to the broader networked world of contemporary poetics. As Philip Mead notes, contemporary poetics ‘suggests the cultural and textual relations of language art, with all its associations of a (potentially) communicative medium, human-only pattern making, interconnectedness, local end-use, global extent, virtual capacity, the circulation of codes and energy, metacommunication, noise (interference) and interactivity’.¹

Lollyology is available on Lulu and, despite quibbles with the tiny point size, that is nothing that a good pair of spectacles won’t fix.