Bottled Oddities: The Collected Poems of Dawson Hann

POETRY

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Dawson Hann’s poems, as the title implies, are all highly individual in their structures and points of view. They engage comprehensively, and often humorously, with those truths of human experience that our emotions, and our imagination, at times long for. They sit upon a shelf of life’s varied experiences, inviting you to sample, through compelling imagery and a diversity of poetic forms, the meaning the poet has extracted from a remarkably rich life of travel and human engagement. Not just this, but also a poetic faith in the truths lying often unseen at the heart of frequently ordinary human experiences. Likewise, they take you on journeys into memories new and old, restlessly yet beautifully searching for the truths always to be found there too.

The poetic journeys in this collection are frequently uplifting and always authentic illustrations of the poet’s conviction that nothing in life is quite what it seems and that poetic forms are as good a way as any to illuminate so many truths about how we understand ourselves and others.

Dawson Hann has spent a lifetime with books, as a teacher of literature for forty years, and is always happy to explore new genres. He has enjoyed encountering ‘the reality of experience’, as James Joyce encouraged, travelling widely in the United States, Asia, and Europe, as well as making yearly pilgrimages into the outback of Australia, feeling deeply the ‘spirit of place’ in his own backyard. Around the age of fifty, the rich diversity of his experiences living vividly in his memory and imagination urged an expression in verse. He hoped thereby to connect himself and others to just some of the human insights provided by his varied experiences. The result, after 25 years of a poem now and then, is this collection.