Aden Rolfe



Review Short: Aden Rolfe’s False Nostalgia

Aden Rolfe’s False Nostalgia presents a collection of memories and corresponding vagaries of forgetting, which stimulate and unsettle in unpredictable and oblique turns of thought and phrase. His work includes philosophical, lyrical and confessional voices, the overall discourse serving to recreate and recover highly original self-objects in time and space.

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Aden Rolfe Interviews Eliot Weinberger

While the prevailing formula for the contemporary essay seems to be information plus thesis – a collection of facts held together by authorial intentions – Eliot Weinberger’s approach is striking for a deceptively simple difference.

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Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

When we consider the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, we inevitably find ourselves discussing not the one but the many: the various extant editions of the compendium, the versions lost to fire and flood and strife over the centuries, the diverse and sometimes contradictory volumes that have pretended to the title at one time or another.

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(f) fabulous ones

I By the time you read the word ‘pebble’ you’re already thinking ‘water’ thinking ‘skin’ thinking ‘one is not enough’. To collect something frees it from the need to be useful—gilded boats and eggplant robes, sugar dandies and scented locks— …

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(k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush

I Names change but the concept stays the same, tracks you across the valley. Night rides in on a gust star-scatter like so much porcelain. Is an alibi a deleted scene or a red thread? Dust in the pigment matted …

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(m) those that have just broken the flower vase

I For some, the relation between the body and external objects is unclear, even when buds are underfoot. For others, it’s the symbolism of the vase they fail to grasp. For both kinds, the gap in understanding is an effective …

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(h) those that are included in this classification

I There are those which are alike in spite of appearance which share a secret affinity, an invisible harmony. But then there are those which are neither alike nor unalike that you place in separate boxes as the wind picks …

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(a) those that belong to the emperor

I There are those you expect him to own and those of which he is not yet aware those catalogued and counted and those he hasn’t thought to dream up those he tolerates on account of his daughter and those …

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Rolfe on with Object Study

Photo by Ian ten Seldam Only heads and tongues loll. Apart from one’s time, what can be bided? And how broad is a swathe? Cordite Poetry Review is excited to work with the next generation of Aden Rolfe poetics over …

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Meridian

Catalogue everything in the garden by outlook and trope. Both daylight and shoulders can be broad remember, but are leaves defined by veins or diameter? How many stones have been unturned? And what things are not, apart from holes and …

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Review Short: Kevin Brophy’s Walking,

Poetry collections aren’t prone to extensive reprints, so Kevin Brophy’s Walking, – which includes selections from five previous books – is somewhat of a trove for anyone wanting to access his earlier work. It also features a suite of new poems which, in their gentle complexity, are among his most interesting – testimony to a writer who’s carefully honed his craft over a 30-year stretch.

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Out of Politeness

Out of politeness you probably wouldn’t say, especially when spring has started false and hailstones small as ball bearings ring the roof keeping you trapped at the library a cancelled anatomy book under your arm – or perhaps it’s a …

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Aden Rolfe Reviews Marion May Campbell

Marion May Campbell's Fragments from a Paper Witch arrived not without anticipation. Despite the publication of four of her novels and the staging of several theatre works, this is her first collection, drawing together diverse works of poetry, prose poetry, fictocritical essay and performance writing.

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