AustLit

'Nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud told his friends in Africa that he had “seen Australia”. But what did he mean by “seen”? Visited? Viewed on the horizon? Imagined?

'The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau is a book of antipodes—inversions—of the prose poems collected in Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, which Toby Fitch turns upside down, hijacking and re-versing their content. Here you will find collages, redactions, homophonic and metonymic mistranslations, pattern poems, concrete poems and other systematic derangements, some curiously child-like, others warped by the virtual world. Rimbaud’s prose proves fertile ground in which to grow Bloomin’ Notions—poems that see the land Down Under in an other light. ' (Publication summary)