John Mateer

Den australiske poeten John Mateer befinner sig i sina dikter på ständig resa och i dialog med sina föregångare för att undersöka hur vår historia och vår kultur påverkar vilka vi är och våra förutsättningar. Motiven hämtas från poetens blick på såväl den värld han passerar igenom och de boksidor han läser. Med detta större urval presenteras på svenska en av den australiensiska samtidspoesin främsta och internationellt mest erkända röster. John Mateer är född 1971 i Sydafrika och flyttade som 18-åring med sin familj till Australien. Sedan debuten 1994 har han utkommit med ett dussintal diktsamlingar.

Focusing on experiences of dislocation and on the importance of image and translation, That Nostalgia records John Mateer's travels and his witnessing of the inequities and pleasures of life in many parts of the world, from China and Japan, South-East Asia and Turkiye, through Portugal, and then, further west, to Mexico and the USA. Central to his poetics is an awareness of the artifice of the Imperial, or, as he coins it, "Empire, that Nostalgia". As the first European power to lose its global empire, Portugal plays a special role in Mateer's imagination; with its continuing connections to Asia and Africa, and its own cosmopolitan life led among the ruins. Having spent his youth in South Africa, Mateer's sensitivity to politics in all its forms allows him to make of that nostalgia various kinds of irony through which he can carefully observe the present world. Throughout the work he is attentive, not only to language itself, but also to its internalized practices, cultural and spiritual. That Nostalgia is more personal than Unbelievers, or 'The Moor' and more historically engaged than Joao: (sonnets). Its invitation to readers is to have them question their own subjectivity, their own unknowing, to reconsider the elusiveness of deep experience in a vast, often chaotic, contemporary world. The book collects poems written between 1995 and 2016, uniting work from publications that have appeared in Australia, Portugal, Macau, Sumatra, Japan, South Africa and the UK, most now out-of-print and rare, and it does not include work from the author's other Shearsman titles.

Joao is a book of sixty-two sonnets recounting twelve years of the life of a poet who travels widely, encountering friends and loves, translators and, sometimes, famous authors. Its protagonist is Joao of eGoli; his christian name is Portuguese for "John" and his epithet - "Place of Gold" - is that of his birthplace, Johannesburg, in Zulu. The linked poems reveal Joao not only as a cosmopolitan traveller, but also as someone sensative to others preconceptions to how they are also haunted by history. The book's concluding poems evoke a geneology for Joao's restlessness: Cape Town-born parents, Cape Malay friends, a Brazilian uncle, and the great-grandmother from an island, Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the Atlantic. In this book of richly dense sonnets John Mateer presents us with the experiences of someone who travels the world, like so many of us, to understand himself and his place in a shared, global history.

From the teeming cities of Singapore, Tokyo and Beijing to the quiet of a Malaccan street, a Honshu mountain or even a Malay cemetery in Cape Town, Mateer's journeys are out into the unknown world and deep into the mind. Like the early twentieth-century French poet and archaeologist Victor Segalen, who is key to the book's later poems on China, Mateer always affirms the power and pleasure of the foreign.

World Literature Today has described John Mateer as "the most recent reincarnation of of the international poet". Born in South Africa, John Mateer has for the past two decades been documenting the world seen from the Indian Ocean edge of Australia, travelling frequently to Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Unbelievers or 'The Moor', like his previous surveys of the visages of the Portuguese Empire in Southern Barbarians and of his memories of South Africa in Ex-White-described by novelist J. M. Coetzee as "rolling back the tide of forgetting"-recovers aspects of the hidden past that haunt our present. In Unbelievers, Mateer seeks out evidence of the importance of the Islamic and Arabic history in places as diverse as Dubai, Seville, Cairo and the Portuguese village of Monsanto. He is not only interested in the past but in the deep present, its poetics.

Presenting major new work and poems selected from five collections, this anthology exemplifies the range, development, and cumulative power of an important poet. Revealing restless subjectivity, the visiting and revisiting of fault lines, and cultural silence, this compilation illustrates the author's international significance and his relevance in regards to Australian culture.