Aidan Coleman – April 19 2020

English Language Day (UN) – April 23

Coincides with William Shakespeare’s birthday and World Book and Copyright Day.

Aidan is a poet, reviewer, speechwriter and academic. He studied at the University of Adelaide and was an award-winning high school English and History teacher before becoming a speechwriter. Aidan’s other poetry publications include The Main North Road, Sun in Winter and Cartoon Snow. His poetry has been featured on ABC Radio National’s ‘A Pod of Poets’ and has been published in Australian and international journals. Besides writing his own poetry, Aidan has co-edited the poetry anthologies Catch Fire: Friendly Street Poets 33 with Juliet A Paine and Light and Glorie with Thom Sullivan and written reviews, speeches, and textbooks on Shakespeare. He is a co-designer of the MOOC Shakespeare Matters with the AdelaideX project and is currently writing a biography of John Forbes with the assistance of the Australia Council. At age 31, Aidan was diagnosed with astrocytoma, a tumour on his brain stem and given a 50:50 chance of survival. He has regained his health, although with some lasting damage, and luckily, unlike many stroke survivors, his memories are intact. Aidan is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide.

Avenues & Runways
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005; ISBN 9781876040697
Avenues & Runways introduces an exciting new voice to readers of Australian poetry. An imagist of striking originality, Aidan Coleman captures moods and moments common to us all, revealing the inexhaustible depth of our everyday lives. With generous, sympathetic attention to detail, these poems explore the joys and vagaries of adolescence, student life and married love. Emotionally engaged yet artistically detached, Coleman both immerses himself in his subjects and brings to their resolution the highest and most objective standards of craftsmanship. This debut collection will surely take its place at the forefront of the work of a new generation of Australian poets.
“Aidan Coleman is already one of the finest young poets in the country, and easily the most hair-raising imagist, the most piercing epigrammatist.” – Peter Goldsworthy
“Dizzying imagery, executed with utter control. Coleman’s artistry puts him in the forefront of young poets anywhere.” – Les Murray

Asymmetry
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012; ISBN 9781921556319
Coleman’s images are lightning flashes. With lucid spareness this powerful collection contains beautiful, and sometimes shocking, poetry. The poems vividly and movingly trace experiences inconceivable to most: losing and then fighting to regain mind, movement, voice, words. It is emotional, but always controlled. This fearful experience, and Coleman’s expression of it, drives the collection; then, the collection opens out into the beauty and immediacy of his sequence of remarkable love poems. In the words of Peter Goldsworthy: “What greater challenge for a poet than the recovery of language after its loss? These dense, powerful poems are the fruits of Coleman’s year-long struggle. They read like some profound and moving metaphor for the process of writing poetry itself, but on a far more important plane, as we follow him from struck muteness to the dredging up of the bare bones of language, a process of reclamation that seems to find its fullest and most joyous expression – its cure – in the sensuous love poems for his wife that conclude the book, the wife who was at his side every painful inch of the way.”