Axolotl Waltz
i’d be lying if i was telling the truth
In axolotl waltz, Nathan Shepherdson steers a rusty trolley with its wobbly wheel as he haunts the aisles in the Supermarket of Casual Koans (SOCK). What he can’t find, he invents, or at other times puts items back he bought months ago, on their same shelf, unopened. Shepherdson is perhaps an outlier in Australian Poetry – grows his own punctuation, turns water into accidental wit, stares at the seeds of random ideas with a synthetic light in his eyes. Yet he understands that shadows are the perfect fabric for a new suit or old clothes. It seems the shooting stars he’s looking for have blown their headlights. Although he knows they are out there. There is a quiet darkness he weighs by the gram. He understands you need to throw the thing away in order to keep it. Earnestness is not a tune he can hold. Shepherdson has been known to patrol his own thoughts, half a full stop on his head. When he sees he’s in trouble he calls out to himself, dives in to save himself, then somehow manages to drag himself (plus the odd poem) back to shore. He lives in the constant reminder of his parent’s example, when as a child, they explained to him, “If you have a feather and a stone, you have an alphabet.”
Nathan Shepherdson is the author of eight books of poetry. He has received several prizes including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Joesphine Ulrick Poetry Prize, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, and the Mary Gilmore Award. He has been a fortunate and frequent collaborator with artists, writers and musicians including Alun Leach-Jones, Pascalle Burton, Sandra Selig and Jonathan McBurnie. Since 2017 he has an on-going project Slack Water with Berlin-based painter Arryn Snowball. Nathan is an occasional essayist on the visual arts. His father Gordon Shepherdson is a highly regarded artist. Nathan was born and lives in Meanjin/Brisbane.
