A Blink of Time's Eye
by
David Ray Adès
Publication date
ISBN:
October
2025
978-1-923248-15-1
About the author
David Adès’s poems and short stories have been published all over the world. His many honours include the University of Canberra’s Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize, shortlistings for the Newcastle, and three nominations for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Sydney, where he produces and hosts the podcast Poets’ Corner.
About the book
"I have appointed myself detective to my own life," David Adès writes in "Today's Weather." And nothing escapes the gaze of this persistent and perceptive investigator. This strange and unusual sort of detective work is undertaken not with any expectation of finding clear answers, but with finding a way to live with the realisation that they will never be found. The result is a book of bifurcations and multiplications; of roads taken and not taken; of living between the "here" and the "there"; of presences that look like absences, and absences that oppressively present; and "of every prior certainty/burnt beyond recognition" ("Smoke").
The unexamined life, we were told many years ago, is not worth living. David Adès has taken this advice to heart; and through his rigorous scrutiny of a rich interior life, he has produced a volume of poems worth living for.
The delicate lines of David Adès’s poetry weaves coherence from an incoherent world. Always, this poetry, in its various unveilings of the deeper levels of self, has the ring of authenticity, of experience bitter and wonderful. A Blink in Time’s Eye is a very impressive collection.
JOHN FOULCHER
David’s poetry has always been concerned with timeless moments, the frozen frames that compose our lives. In A Blink of Time’s Eye, he has brought together poems of family and memory, reflection and wondering, undercut with longing and grief and and the strangeness of the normal. These are poems that should be read in moments of uncertainty and doubt because the poet has found his way out of those dark places with the torchlight of his poetry, and the reader will too.
DAMEN O'BRIEN
Like Walt Whitman's songs, these poems are imbued with candour, long cadences and rhetorical segues that are beguiling, sombre, and insistent. David Adès is the gossamer chronicler of a temporal malaise. In A Blink of Time's Eye, he turns his consciousness into a subject of formal inquiry as he questions, not what do we believe in times of moral collapse, but how?
MICHELLE CAHILL