Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
A Blink of Time’s Eye
by David Adés
5 Islands Press
October 2025, ISBN: 978-1-923248-15-1, Paperback,
I’ve long been a fan of David Adés’ work. Not just his poetry, but also the poetry podcast Poet’s Corner which Adés hosts for WestWords. Some of these interviews are over two hours long, a few even edging towards three, and they really get into the nitty gritty of a poet’s full body of work, process, techniques and themes. I suspect that part of why Adés own work is so rich is how deeply he understands the making of a good poem. Adés’ latest collection, A Blink of Time’s Eye, is his best yet, showing a mastery of the lyric form. As the title suggests, these are poems that transcend time even as they engage with the many ways that time binds us. The book explores the many things that are lost through the span of a life, and what remains, even after life is over:
stories making themselves moment by moment,
intersecting, rearranging, tranforming. (“Beyond Measure”)
The book is structured into four sections, each focused on time in one sense or another: future, past, present and an imagined, conjured past, longing mingling with nostalgia for alternative pathways. These tenses are not fixed, but, like memory, shift, stretch and warp (“bifurcating, unpredictable”) to align with desire, perception, artefacts or snippets of memories. Nearly all of the poems pivot around language and what it can and cannot do, and ways in which it pushes against those limitations, allowing for the inherent uncertainty and complexity of life by use of figurative language, imagery, structure and sound, as in the poem that opens the collection, “Going On”:
Lay me down. Curl me into the tight ball of my trauma.
Clench me into my tomb, my womb of silence—language
fails me here, the chasm between a story lived and a story told.
Human life with its inevitable cycles of up and down, pain and joy, is aligned to the natural world. The bodies decline is both something to fight against and beautiful in the way the entropy of time’s arrow brings us back to where we started, fractal like, as in “Today’s Weather”, a poem that sets up the broader themes of the book perfectly: “The faltering betrayal of flesh, memory’s slipping grip,”. Birth and death parallel one another: “In the end, as in the beginning, it is about breath”. Even when death is imminent, there is meaning in each individual breath, in the striving: “I am convinced that I have years yet to solve the riddles”. The poems are tightly written with a clarity that belies the complexity of what they are leaning into: “beyond ourselves, the traces we leave”.
Many of the poems in the first section, “To Wherever It Is I Am Going”, utilise rhythmic techniques to create sonic meaning, particularly anaphora which is present in a number of poems in this section, beginning with “Life is Elsewhere”. This poem begins with the repetition of “else”: “else the universe removes its cloak of dark matter and reveals/the strings of stars lying behind it” and “where” “where the volcano shifts and rumbles”. Like many anaphora poems, “Life is Elsewhere” has an oratory quality, the images of loss accumulating towards the turn or volta, the end of our species: “where we fail to overcome the litany/of our failures.” There are little connections between the poems, such as the way the poem “Tangents” references of the epigraph of “Life is Elsewhere” or how the rhythms of “Before the Flood” pick up the anaphora of “Life is Elsewhere” capturing the same quality of oration but moving from the universal to the personal so that both poems seem to be linked:
Before the flood,
before the teeming downfall,
before our first kiss, the headlong rush
The poetry is balanced beautifully between concrete imagery and the esoteric, as in “My Mob,” which describes the joy of an Australian homecoming against human and avian sounds:
Five larrikin magpies, plump and energetic,
play wing-tag between the gums,
swooping and diving in raucous conference,
stitching the sky with warble and flight,
with boisterous irreverence,
welcoming me home.
Meaning is also created dialectically, through the push and pull of inner and outer worlds, through the passage of time and the way that time itself is undermined by imagination and memory. Much of the third section, “Past Whispering in the Tent of Present” is dedicated to Adés’ children, infused with a care that mirrors many of the themes in the book:
so that even as I lay down rules,
as I set boundaries,
as father, as guardian, as shepherd of safety,
I am willing the breaking of them, the breaking through,
I secretly cheer the testing, the challenging,
constant and inevitable as the back and forth
of the tides,
as I navigate fatigue and childhood,
as I beach myself each night
while three worlds make themselves—
whether I can keep up or not. (“Tidal”)
A Blink of Time’s Eye is a rich exploration of the ongoing dance between life and death. Time’s progression here is both real and imaginary, a powerful dialectic between loss and transcendence:
being unspoken, every promise annulled,
and behind you, the great shadow of every grief
is set free, departing like a holed balloon,
and you are both weight and lightness together,
waiting on the shore where the boat will come,
there, at the last when there is no one but you. (“There, at the Last”)