A Personal History of Vision

Luke Fischer  

A Personal History of Vision expands on the concerns of Fischer’s acclaimed first collection Paths of Flight and embodies what Judith Beveridge has described as his ‘seemingly effortless ability to blend visual detail and imaginative vision.’ Intertwining the personal and the historical, the modern and the primeval, culture and nature, these poems explore vision in its many senses, often with reference to the visual arts. At their heart is a search for an enlarged awareness of ourselves and the world, in which the visible and the invisible, nature and spirit find one another. At the same time these poems are awake to inadequacies and the trials of death and suffering––personal, political, and ecological. Yet, even in the darkness (the focus of the second section) they detect possibilities of transformation.

Praise for A Personal History of Vision:

His second book of poetry shows Luke Fischer is outstanding among a new generation of Australian poets – there is everywhere throughout it intimations of the sublime.

Like his master, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luke Fischer is finely attuned to phenomena that reside both under and beyond the surface of things. In our contemporary world filled with incessant distraction, Fischer’s dedicated gaze meditates on the unexpected and miraculous in nature and opens doors towards celestial realms. And we are the grateful recipients of this particular gift: Fischer's exploration of the fragile inner places where the heart and soul long to reside, despite the exteriority of modern life.

Luke Fischer unites what is best in the Romantics’ vision of poetry, an ability to enter fully into the beauty of existence, with a spirit of intellectual rigour as the mind interrogates the act of perception. These close and fruitful readings of nature, of human existence and of art, while recognizing the tragic element of life, offer a rich tapestry of the sensual. In this new collection Fischer makes of poetry the sensitive, skilful translation of “feeling’s contours”.

PETER BOYLE

For Fischer, poetry is a place of safety, a place to order things, to put them in perspective. The effect of the poems is calm, restrained, but reading back and forth it becomes evident that this is a calm that is achieved through struggle.  ALI JANE SMITH, THE AUSTRALIAN

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: February 2017
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 112 pages
SIZE: 210 (h) x 140 (w) mm
ISBN: 9781742589381
RIGHTS: Australia/New Zealand
CATEGORY: Luke Fischer, Poetry, UWAP Poetry,