The Ease of Eggs
by
Benjamin Dodds
Publication date
ISBN:
August
2025
978-1-923248-14-4
About the author
Benjamin Dodds was born in the Riverina. A former lab technician and high-school teacher of Italian and English, Dodds has for two decades worked as a primary school teacher in inner western Sydney, where he now lives. The Ease of Eggs is Ben’s third collection, after Regulator (2014) and Airplane Baby Banana Blanket (2020).
About the book
The Ease of Eggs, Benjamin Dodds’s third collection, finds the uncanny in the quotidian world, offers you a pair of Havaianas at midnight, extends a hand and asks you to join him.
The world Dodds witnesses and recalls in these tidy, playful lyric poems has a Wes Anderson feel: there is dignity and courtesy and unexpected kindness; there is casual violence and there are bodily functions; you stub your toe on the grotesque, the bizarre and the angular. Life goes the way one knows it in the burbs, but slower and a little quieter and more brightly lit; the contrast is high, the tone nostalgic and the set designs are trim and gorgeous.
Dodds’s poems are alert for the strange and quietly ecstatic inside the ordinary. The moments he manifests beguile and surprise; nothing feels quite the way it looks. His moments, though often everyday, shimmer, their past lives climbing out of their present incarnations: the difficult birth of a calf, a night walk in thongs, a ghosting or two, the dying of a dog, the bullying of a child, the drama of a bird in a classroom, the recollection of a mother’s bra, a science experiment, the arrival of rain to a suburban (strata title) balcony, two weeks with an antique stove, an afternoon in a natural history museum.
Dodds sees with a kindly eye, ready for mischief, alert for trouble, happy to help. The tenderness and acuity of his seeing, the playfulness of his shaping and the carefulness of his saying seem to invite a reader to compassion and gratitude and service. Nothing the poet preaches; just the lesson you might draw from the way he stands present in his life and world.
After reading, or you might say consuming, Benjamin Dodds’s The Ease of Eggs, you may well look up, as I did, and find the world more acutely interesting, more intense. Nothing is too eclectic, too out of range, for Dodds’s curious pen—he excels at school obser-vations, the universe at large, men and gender, peering into cinematic culture, science at work. Who else but Dodds would pose such a telling critique of bovine evolution as his title poem offers? And his take on home ownership—with its fractional analysis of mortgages and titles—makes a resonant reckoning that subtly suggests one’s life might be similarly calibrated.
The Ease of Eggs gives us a buffet of poetic bon mots, a cabinet of the eclectic; Dodds delivers poems to dine out with. But all the while he quietly advocates for a better world. In The Ease of Eggs, we always arrive unexpectedly at understanding and kindness.
CAROL JENKINS
Playfulness and curiosity mark The Ease of Eggs, which builds on the almost-strange, slightly out-of-phase world of his first two books. There’s always a sense of something hidden, underlying what’s visible; of things seemingly about to transform into something either quite other. His play with form enriches his investigation of the enthralling variousness of his subject matter—ghosts, the mad ecosystem of classrooms, toilet paper, space travel, the kilogram, thongs, conspiracy theories, Scooby Doo, Granny Smith apples, Alien, and ever-present eggs. The world Dodds’s poems inhabit is endlessly fertile and generative, his a language of exactitude.
GREG McLAREN
Fearless and deeply political, The Ease of Eggs is like a neon light flashing in the night. In this plangent and stirring collection, Benjamin Dodds exposes the edges of vulnerability and violence in “the monstrous honour of eggs.” The collection culminates in a devastating moment where the consolation for the experience of trauma is expressed in the collective voicing: “Like everyone else, /they assure me /there’s a poem in that.” In The Ease of Eggs, Dodds demonstrates his incredible versatility, and he breathes new life into old forms, like the concrete poem—“Bang!,” which will haunt you forever.
CASSANDRA ATHERTON