Insomnia’s Gates, James Waller’s debut collection, collating Burning Stones, Rings of Blue and Blinded Bulls in one volume, is now available on Amazon. For Amazon.de click here. For Amazon.co.uk click here, Amazon.com.au, here, Amazon.com, here.
Written with a painter’s sensibility, Insomnia’s Gates takes the reader on a colour-filled journey from the environs of Melbourne and the Australian bush to the painted canvases and mythologies of Europe. The individual poems, ranging from elegiac reflection to pulsing, surreal imagism, linger and echo, and like all good lyrics lure the reader back, to dwell on both the music and the meaning.
Australian poet, Nicholas Powell, writes in the introduction: “Painterly is a too-easy descriptor for these poems, which, for all their surface texture, have a larger ambition – to access areas of inner experience that are often occluded in lyric poetry. It is utterly tactile work that exudes the palpable temperature of things in themselves, but also what they stand for in Waller’s symbolic, but never gnomic poetic.”
James had been a feature reader and performer in the following readings and festivals: The Spinning Room, Dan poetry readings, Courthouse Readings, Passionate Tongues, Overload Poetry Festival (Melbourne), Speed Poets (Brisbane), Brown Bread Mix Tape (Dublin), Clonakilty Organic Arts Festival (Ireland).
Individual poems have been published in the following journals: “Your Voice” and “Melbourne Drifts” in Five Poetry Journal, “Swedish Runes“, “Grave Notes” and “Paint The Icons” in Eureka Street, “Upon Beds of lead and Silver” in From this Broken Hill, “Surrender” in Page 17 (issue 2), “The Photograph” in Stylus Poetry Journal. A reading of “Prisoners of Silence” was screened on Channel 31 (Melbourne). An audio recording of The Call was broadcast on 3RRR (Melbourne independent radio).
Collections (a sample from each)
Bilingual Russian/English chapbook: Голубая Вселенная