Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
Excerpt
Livaditis can carry that wish into much more startling territory. In “Poet,” a man encounters an abandoned baby, hesitates, and then takes the child home. His body develops the means to feed it. The event is impossible, but the emotional logic is exact: another person’s need calls forth a capacity he did not previously possess. Here poetic imagination becomes a form of responsibility. It does more than decorate experience with unusual images. It asks what kind of transformation might be necessary if we fully accepted the demand made upon us by another vulnerable life.
That imaginative generosity should not obscure the book’s humor. Livaditis is often funny, sometimes mischievously so, and his humor prevents the prevailing sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone. “Correspondence” exposes a writer’s vanity through a deliciously uncomfortable reversal involving a roommate and a letter. “Fame” makes recognition arrive under circumstances in which nobody would sensibly desire it. Bureaucratic procedures elsewhere become absurd performances whose logic survives only by humiliating the person subjected to them. We laugh, but the laughter often catches against something painful. The joke reveals how readily institutions, ambitions, and even literary dreams lose contact with human needs.
The religious imagery is equally resistant to solemn predictability. God, Christ, angels, resurrection, and Paradise appear repeatedly, but they do not assemble into a reassuring system. Divine figures may seem uncertain or vulnerable; miracles may answer a small embarrassment rather than a grand theological question. In “Answer,” walking on the waves receives an explanation grounded in having lost the way. The reversal brings transcendence close to ordinary bewilderment. What matters is often less the possession of divine power than the possibility that the divine might understand weakness. Livaditis’s sacred imagination is most persuasive when it bends toward the person who cannot manage.
Nor does political conviction disappear when religion is spoken. “Applied Marxism,” with its comic relationship between hidden money and approaching moonlight, lets material calculation and imaginative freedom disturb one another. The poem is too brief and playful to function as a doctrinal argument. Its interest lies in the friction between ways of valuing the world. Across the volume, economic deprivation remains tangible even when a scene becomes dreamlike. Rent, hunger, wages, worn clothing, and precarious shelter keep returning. Poems may travel beyond ordinary reality, but poverty continues to determine who waits, who serves, who commands, and who is allowed to rest.
“Horse Eyed Women” gives these concerns a larger dramatic setting. Its hotel gathers desire, loneliness, money, recollection, and violence within a temporary place of lodging. People arrive carrying lives that cannot be understood from their public appearance. The hotel clerk’s relationship with a useless key is especially suggestive: an object associated with access becomes an instrument of longing for an inaccessible past. Around the more conspicuous dramas, the maids continue their work. Their conversations and their presence near the dirty sink draw attention toward the labour that supports other people’s stories, then remains to deal with what those stories leave behind.
