The Rearrangement
Melbourne University Press, 112 pp, $19.95 hb
The Rearrangement by Alex Skovron
From the very beginning of The Rearrangement the reader is involved in themes which will play repeatedly through the poems: learning, knowledge and memory, and the way in which these work to satisfy, or frustrate, a metaphysical sense of order, even truth. There is a great fight against forgetfulness:
Trying to recall so much
and so much more beyond recalling
If you do all this
and still count yourself a survivor
and expose your eye to the swivelling
moon
and smile
and swing your face into the clock be
hind you
always behind you
If you do all this
you will have conquered the invisible
again(from the opening poem ‘A Concise History of the Moon’)
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