AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'False Nostalgia is rare among poetry collections, a work which is both lyrical and philosophical. It explores the way memory works, and the role memory plays in our sense of identity, and what we take to be the significant moments in our lives – the relationship between what we remember and the stories we tell about ourselves. Through stand-alone poems, exploratory poetic sequences, and essays which read like extended prose poems, Rolfe considers the complex connections between experience and recollection, the drive to document the moment, the fear of forgetting, the power of nostalgia, and the creative unreliability of memory itself. He approaches his subjects from oblique angles, evoking feelings of connection and disconnection, the experience of never quite grasping your own understanding of things. The poems place the reader in half-remembered places – on beaches walked during holidays, in festival gatherings and forests, film screenings and auction houses – asking not only what it means to look back fondly on a second-rate experience, but what it means to look forward to looking back on a moment while you’re still living through it.' (Source: Publisher's website)
Notes
-
Dedication: For Claire
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Brianna Bullen Reviews False Nostalgia by Aden Rolfe
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , December no. 21 2017;'‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within. This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what we remember,” which is then challenged and amended through Rolfe’s poetic interrogation in four sections. This poem introduces the settings—“coastlines and beaches / clearings and trails”—recurring through the collection, and the illusion of coherency, dependent on forgetting incongruities. It sets up the speaker and the addressee, their edited and untethered beings. Memory becomes “a range of values / not definitive states,” contemporary, relational, amendable, and always bittersweet. “They say we’re plural, post-memory / too old not to know / we should be playing what when / instead of / what if.’' (Introduction)
-
Review Short : Aden Rolfe’s False Nostalgia
2017
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 February no. 57 2017; 'Aden Rolfe’s False Nostalgia presents a collection of memories and corresponding vagaries of forgetting, which stimulate and unsettle in unpredictable and oblique turns of thought and phrase. His work includes philosophical, lyrical and confessional voices, the overall discourse serving to recreate and recover highly original self-objects in time and space.' (Introduction) -
Aden Rolfe, False Nostalgia
2016
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 18 June 2016;
— Review of False Nostalgia 2016 selected work poetry
-
Aden Rolfe, False Nostalgia
2016
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 18 June 2016;
— Review of False Nostalgia 2016 selected work poetry -
Review Short : Aden Rolfe’s False Nostalgia
2017
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 February no. 57 2017; 'Aden Rolfe’s False Nostalgia presents a collection of memories and corresponding vagaries of forgetting, which stimulate and unsettle in unpredictable and oblique turns of thought and phrase. His work includes philosophical, lyrical and confessional voices, the overall discourse serving to recreate and recover highly original self-objects in time and space.' (Introduction) -
Brianna Bullen Reviews False Nostalgia by Aden Rolfe
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , December no. 21 2017;'‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within. This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what we remember,” which is then challenged and amended through Rolfe’s poetic interrogation in four sections. This poem introduces the settings—“coastlines and beaches / clearings and trails”—recurring through the collection, and the illusion of coherency, dependent on forgetting incongruities. It sets up the speaker and the addressee, their edited and untethered beings. Memory becomes “a range of values / not definitive states,” contemporary, relational, amendable, and always bittersweet. “They say we’re plural, post-memory / too old not to know / we should be playing what when / instead of / what if.’' (Introduction)