Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Now-Then
New and Selected Poems
By Mike Ladd
Wakefield Press
ISBN: 9781923388215, 194 pages, Sept 2025
The poetry world is a tight ecosystem, particularly in a country like Australia where the web of poets, publishers, journals, editors and readers interact closely. Writing poetry is only one part of that system. Of course this is true of anything, but with poetry, the readership is small, and much more interlinked than other literary forms. It’s generally difficult for poets to sell books in any way other than at readings, and festival or airtime is more limited than for prose. For over forty years Mike Ladd has been a part of that ecosystem, so much so that it’s easy to forget just how much actual poetry writing he has done. From his superb weekly poetry broadcast on ABC’s Radio National’s Poetica which ran for some eighteen years, to installations, multimedia videos, participation in Adelaide’s fifty plus year collective Friendly Street Poets and even the creation of public poetry street signs, Ladd has been a visible representation of poetry’s reach. It is fitting that Wakefield Press, Adelaide’s premier publisher, has come out with a New and Selected featuring fifty-six new poems, almost a whole book’s worth, along with substantial selections from six of Ladd’s previous books, Invisible Mending (2016), Transit (2007), Rooms and Sequences (2003), Close to Home (2000), Picture’s Edge (1994), and The Crack in the Crib (1984). That’s a lot of books. Reading these selections together as a single work, combined with almost entirely new collection, create not only an overview of a life in poetry, a Mike Ladd primer if you will, but it is actually only a fraction of Ladd’s oeuvre which includes eleven books along with the radio and video work. One of the joys of a ‘new and selected’ like this is discovering the recurring themes across a poet’s work that might not be so obvious in a single collection, for example, the many influences on the work over the years, from the influence of ancient Roman’s in the personae “Anakhronismos” in Rooms and Sequences, which I reviewed for Cordite back in 2003: http://cordite.org.au/reviews/ball-ladd/:
And now, having never paid him
due attention in his life,
I notice Bursaries everywhere:
in markets, at the hippodrome,
glimpsing his likeness in public urinals,
hearing that high girlish laugh
in every feasting crowd
To the Pantun sequence from Invisible Mending, “A Book of Hours at Rimbun Dahan”. A Pantun is normally an oral form from Malaysia, but Ladd works it well on the page, with subtle off-rhymes that create a languid feel that is both visually lovely but also playful, another characteristic of Ladd’s work:
Gathering thunder. The eye of the day
winks smoky orange, slips under
a tuduk of purple and monsoon grey.
add to this drama, the Bilal and rooster.
You can see a visual version of these Pantun here, in collaboration with Ladd’s longtime partner Cathy Brooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHbkVNee5ak
Reading the pieces in this collected form shows just how much droll humour there is in Ladd’s work. Here is an early example from Close to Home, which explores “domestic mysteries” like televisions and vacuum cleaners which are continuing to become more mysterious (to me at least) with automated vacuums and smartTVs:
Droning sadly like age,
a thin whine
sucking on thinning carpets, (“Domestic Mystery #1”)
The new poems aren’t all new as such. Many have been published in magazines or newspapers and go back to 2016. What they are however is assured and masterful, drawing on a deep understanding of how poems work from someone who has a very well-developed ear. Many of these poems focus on aging, death, elegy and grief. There are very moving pieces that explore grief in ways that feel fresh, like the death of a father and dog conjoined at night:
Sometimes in the silent house
I wake to sounds that don’t exist.
in the held breath of the kitchen
my dead father makes a sandwich.On my patrol at 2.40 a.m.
long-gone children play in their dressing gowns —
they don’t see me as I step through their game,
the dog snores, though he’s underground. (“Night Patrol”)
These poems are permeated by loss, from the deeply personal loss of a father or mother, the loss of friends in rich elegies, or the ecological loss wrought by human greed over the years. The loss here, even at its most personal, always encompasses transition and something gained through the pain:
But we are approaching –
I can feel your new, strange land
over the horizon,
a great, dark mass
separated from us
by a thin disc of dawn.
You have nearly flown us there. (“Night Flight”)
Another quality immediately apparent in Ladd’s work over the years is a love of sonics, the way the poems create meaning through rhythm, meter, rhymes and off-rhymes, the way words play off one another, assonance and consonance, timbre and texture. Of course you can hear these things overtly when the poetry is read aloud, but it’s also inherent when reading silently, for example:
All the TV lights
through curtain cracks.
Over waste ground
winter green,
a moon
on parole. (“Moonrise in a New Suburb”)
The rhythms feel delicate, sliding down the page easily via the decreasing line lengths, the alliteration of curtain cracks, waste and winter, ground and green and the internal matching of the o sounds in “moon on parole”, all of which creates a second level of meaning beyond the semantic that is soothing and even soporific. Many of the poems in this collection play with sound in this way, evoking literal sounds like waves of high-pitched Cicada hum linking those sounds to the reader’s own breath, as in “Travelling the Golden Highway, Thinking of Global Warming”:
Cicada noise rises and falls
as if the mountain itself were breathing —In panic. Out relax.
In panic. Out relax
The ecological is always present, through an awareness of the widespread negative impacts of human greed:
Open cuts. Artificial mesas —
Ulan coal warms the world
Though the impacts are deeply felt, Ladd is never didactic – the work simply shows, and always with a good dose of that sardonic but genial humour, as with “Occasional Tremors”, a terrific little poem about a minor earthquake or “little shimmy”:
The base note
goes right through your spine.Don’t rattle those dishes at me:
I know I haven’t done them yet.
Now-Then shows just how much Ladd has done and the ways in which the work has transformed and progressed over the years. His older work still feels fresh and it’s a pleasure to be able to read generous selections of multiple books in one place. His newer work is rich with a maturity that allows for the lightest touch and the deepest thought. Whether in the Bolivian Mountains, Java, driving along the Huon Highway or in an Adelaide suburb, Now-Then is full of consistently transcendent and powerful work.