Only Fig & Prosciutto: New & Collected Poems

These poems record a life lived sensuously and to the full in three countries: Italy Ireland and Australia. In an era when eros-charged descriptions of foreign feasts make best-selling travel books and TV programs this book will find a large audience. But Luke Whitington is far more than a sensualist whose minds tongue curves inquisitively round gnocchi in the shape of a famous courtesans navel. This is a poet who knows history and art and feels intensely both youths freshness and the nostalgias of age lamenting lost parents and lovers. His Italy is flavoured by Horace and Brodsky; and his imagery is rich and deep. Hedges shaken by a storm in Ireland are seen running away like green-cloaked rogues. The moon rises like a Soaring circular Sphinx slowing in mid-summer night air. Youth clings to a middle-aged mans complexion Like an anxious fly. A high wind sets the leaves streaming this way that way / Like frightened mice. Lovers lie embraced While the whole world looks and thinks it sees. Pigeon-swarms intoxicated with the element swerve dissolve reform as if to a heavenly conductors baton. Cows in a water-meadow munch flowers where Vikings rose in roars from bumping prows of curved ships. A poet of such luxuriant talent would normally have revealed it over a lifetime in a dozen slim volumes. Whitington instead has saved all his riches and served them up in this one sitting. Enjoy! - Mark OConnorFor years I have been part of a small group of friends who have received almost daily an early morning email from Luke W. As a rule it would contain only two or three words of text and an attachment - a poem. Newly minted fresh out of his imagination sometimes still to be completed. A prodigious production that meant a prodigious inner push to do poetry. It is something that would at times irritate: how does he dare doing so much and so well? To see now finally in a book some of those works gives a sense of timelessness to those morning emails - they are now part of a coherent whole of a life justified also by a poetic product of considerable true quality and appeal. Good on you early riser constant brilliant writer! - Paolo Totaro AM