That Nostalgia

<p class=ql-align-justify>Focusing on experiences of dislocation and on the importance of image and translation <em>That Nostalgia</em> records John Mateer's travels and his witnessing of the inequities and pleasures of life in many parts of the world from China and Japan South-East Asia and Türkiye through Portugal and then further west to Mexico and the USA. Central to his poetics is an awareness of the artifice of the Imperial or as he coins it Empire that Nostalgia. As the first European power to lose its global empire Portugal plays a special role in Mateer's imagination; with its continuing connections to Asia and Africa and its own cosmopolitan life led among the ruins. Having spent his youth in South Africa Mateer's sensitivity to politics in all its forms allows him to make of that nostalgia various kinds of irony through which he can carefully observe the present world. Throughout the work he is attentive not only to language itself but also to its internalized practices cultural and spiritual. <em>That Nostalgia</em> is more personal than <em>Unbelievers or 'The Moor'</em> and more historically engaged than <em>João: (sonnets)</em>. Its invitation to readers is to have them question their own subjectivity their own unknowing to reconsider the elusiveness of deep experience in a vast often chaotic contemporary world. The book collects poems written between 1995 and 2016 uniting work from publications that have appeared in Australia Portugal Macau Sumatra Japan South Africa and the UK most now out-of-print and rare and it does not include work from the author's other Shearsman titles.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p><br></p>