AustLit

'From infancy to the last breath, David Adès turns a compassionate eye on humanity. He explores ambition, failure, love and loss with “the rich poverty of language.” – MIKE LADD

'This book, richly suffused with a personal metaphysics of light and dark, is an extraordinary meditation on the intricacies of affection and intimacy, loss and grief. Its graceful and eloquent poems possess a delicacy that might be written on the skin. –PAUL HETHERINGTON

'David Adès’ luminous and honest collection, Afloat in Light, is chiefly a celebration of fatherhood and of paying attention, utilising Simone Weil’s notion that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’. The collection extends to existence and loss, and a discourse on motive and meaning. Maps and moral compass are never far away in such explorations and like all good navigators Adès consults the moon and the stars to guide him through emotional terrain that crosses the globe via Australia, India and the United States. Poems about connection and love—familial, intimate, parental and friendship—hold their weight of history via scar tissue and heritage to allow ‘a vast and full space to fill the maps of our lives’. Afloat in Light delicately balances that most crucial aspect of life—of how the ordinary is anything but. Adès is a poet that fully harnesses the verve of small miracles. –LIBBY HART (Publication summary)