Aidan Coleman

Aidan Coleman has published three collections of poetry, most recently Mount Sumptuous (Wakefield Press, 2020). He has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, and the WA Premier’s Book Awards. Aidan is currently completing a biography, Thin Ice: A Life of John Forbes, to be published by Melbourne University Publishing.

'Metric', a new poem by Aidan Coleman

November 2023, no. 459 • 27 October 2023

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Aidan Coleman reviews 'Walk Like a Cow: A memoir' by Brendan Ryan

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

‘The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary,’ Arthur Schopenhauer remarked in The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. While the timespan is different, the proportions are similar. Brendan Ryan’s Walk Like a Cow, which focuses predominantly on the poet’s first twenty-five years, has been written over roughly two decades. The memoir f ... (read more)

States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Secondary' by Aidan Coleman

States of Poetry South Australia - Series One • 22 February 2016

1. Angling over star-fields,the pitches lit like billiard tables.Those lengths you were shouted up and back,lungs scoured by brillo air.The lazier concord of close mown grassand low hanging fruitof the short boundary. A tang of primitiveelectronics: the circuit board's braille labyrinth,the slab type of Amstrad.This callow path, youcannot take, curves around and through,the way a perfect river mi ... (read more)

States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Immortal Diamond' by Aidan Coleman

States of Poetry South Australia - Series One • 22 February 2016

The do-it-yourself piano isn'tkicked to matchwood, and you takethis for affirmation. When wework out how to switch offBob Dylan, your plangent homemadeswill go unaccompanied, no longersought like an injury lost in the mistsof Hansard. People suggest topics they won't be using, and this ismore like an archive sneezethan what yesteryear's beardin physics said it could be.Quite unlike the night beyo ... (read more)

States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Motivational' by Aidan Coleman

States of Poetry South Australia - Series One • 22 February 2016

Fitness: fact, fictionor fantasy? – among thingsmeant. Parachutes open like fuchsias,picnic hampersof kittens float quietly down, as peakspush throughresplendent mists. Your sensefalls upwardlike helium or blinds, now it's preciselysubtitled, you realise –as the first tentative steps emergeto be recordedlike a baby. Consider the aspirinin its exuberancethat picks itself up and turns its ... (read more)

States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Shorts' by Aidan Coleman

States of Poetry South Australia - Series One • 22 February 2016

Octopus Quick across the twilight road,the eight legs of the cat. Flood Water corrects the earthto flatness, patching fields with sky. Alarm Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days. Window The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes. Aidan Coleman ... (read more)

'Barbarian Studies' a new poem by Aidan Coleman

August 2015, no. 373 • 30 July 2015

Weather in which I might beelsewhere, loungingbook in hand, Tim Tams(dark, perhaps), tea a given, instead of the uphill pram push of swaying kids,singing drunkenly –what a coachman circa 1840or his horse felt, probably, ... (read more)