Table of Contents

• I. Calendar
• II. return to a new physics
• III. Anti-landscape
• Anti-landscape: lighthouse beach
• Lighthouse series
• ‘Geophilosophy’
• Ecologue
• IV. The waste of tongues
• The phoenix cup
• Being as such (eulogy)
• In pursuit of blue
• Sentience
• The waste of tongues

Promotional Information

Kate Fagan brings to her work the microcosmically precise insights of a geologist or biologist, but the writings are informed also by a strong sense of social history. As she says, "Written or unwritten, the details collect and return us to context," and included in that context is the post-colonial situation. The long moment of this book's details is beautiful; in The Long Moment the site at which they collect has become astoundingly meaningful. I love this book. -- Lyn Hejinian Kate Fagan writes with an unintrusive precision as she leads her poems toward the illusion that temporality could be suspended. Her imagery implodes gracefully like op-art screen savers set at slower-than-possible speeds. Her poetic artifice, whilst giving an almost-painterly, hallucinatory impression, glimpses the real just enough to enrich both intellect and emotion. In these poems meditative lyricism informs a knowing philosophical scepticism. These are merely a few of the serious pleasures of The Long Moment. -- Pam Brown

About the Author

Kate Fagan was born in 1973 and lives in Sydney. Additional publications include the chapbooks return to a new physics (Sydney: Vagabond) and Thought’s Kilometre (London: Tolling Elves). Her poetry appears in Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets. Kate is the editor of HOW2, a US-based journal of innovative contemporary and modernist writing by women, and co-editor with Peter Minter of material poetics review. Also a musician, she has performed extensively across Australia and in the UK.

Reviews

Fagan, in typical post-language internationalist style, utilises lyric to produce an effect that is both concrete and casual. But it also convinces: “we step into locations / and change them, or they happen to us.” With Fagan there is no preamble, no setting up of the poet’s stall, no hang-up about ‘voice.’ The simple statement above immediately questions itself but without angst; the tone is cool and open. The compression and control here, the artifice used to give the impression of saying so much with so little, produces a poetry not strictly dependent on the character of its author, a poetry which works with its muse at one remove.
*Tim Allen*

The opening and closing sequences are nothing less than brilliant adventures. Silence and nothingness mingle with the world, with otherness, with the bodies of lovers, to produce complex and engaging fugues.
*David McCooey*