Today marks the publication of Clarence Caddell’s second collection BROKEN WORDS.
Clarence stands firmly outside the mainstream of Australian poetry, both due to his style and subject matter. Deeply committed to rhyme and metre, Caddell is blazing a trail of his own. But BROKEN WORDS is far from arid neo-classicism. The poems chronicle a modern divorce with all its pain, regret, delusion, dark humour and desperate hope. Topics range from parental visits to the “White Martyrdom” of marriage and the presence of the Divine amidst psychological torment. On a deeper level, BROKEN WORDS marks a turn towards religion after the sometimes intense scepticism of his first collection The True Gods Attend You (Bonfire, 2022).
The American heavyweight AM Juster has said of BROKEN WORDS, that it “displays a deep love of the formal poetry tradition; it often echoes the wit and style of Byron as well as the dour wryness of Larkin. Nonetheless, the book is rooted in the present with poems about divorce, online dating, and artificial intelligence that are accessible, yet profound enough to merit pleasurable re-readings.”
Canadian poet Alex Rettie writes, “In a poetry world where attention to form and an interest in the personal seem often to be at odds, Clarence Caddell’s work comes as a revelation of what a skilled poet can do…If you want poems that work on your mind, your breath and your heart, Caddell is your man.”
In BROKEN WORDS Clarence Caddell spares no one, least of all himself. His wryly succinct investigations of philosophy and theology amid the mundanity of middle-aged life, reveal things so often buried. BROKEN WORDS marks the maturation of a major talent.
She’d read a little Donne:
Something about a Flea, bout the Sunne
Rising… It happened I held Baudelaire
In a translation that seemed pretty fair.
She’d never heard of him. I read out loud
…
‘Who writes like that today?’ my beauty asked,
‘I mean in English?’ ludicrously tasked,
And picturing myself Don Juan in hell,
I gave the fateful name: Clarence Caddell.”
(”Ars Poetica”)
BROKEN WORDS is available through the Bonfire Books website:
and through Amazon