'As an account of events and personages alone Shadows of Utopia is a singular achievement, as literature it is an immensely impressive tour de force of structural and formal achievement that will surely establish its author in the forefront of contemporary Australian writers.’
Bruce Beaver
Manfred Jurgensen’s Shadows of Utopia…explores…the many meanings that flow from being Australian. Earlier writers have attempted the task (Rex Ingamells, for example, in The Great South Land), but none in as richly comprehensive a way as…in these cantos… As a poetic history Shadows of Utopia is as rich in meaning as Manning Clark’s vision and its dedication to Manning is a tribute to both writers.’
Bruce Dawe
Shadows of Utopia,
University of Southern Queensland Press,
Rockhampton 1994
(With
paintings by Cynthia Breusch)
all memory is now
passions’ foreshore
dockings.
choral chords. man-made reefs
calling creation home.
and those of us
who
cannot swim
enter the tide
to cast the moon’s abandoned sail.
and salty
doubts
will reach the sky
to catch the craft utopia.
and we shall
draw
the serpent’s bow
to call its lightning
resurrection.
and as we drown the
dying
fire’s ashes we shall once more
proclaim the theft of
light.
apologia (10)
the earth is rolling
metred time
riding the inland sea.
rock’s first migration.
land before
discovery.
women’s blood. painted dust birth
plants grown to carnal
history.
it’s rolling underground
the diggers’
alchemy of riches.
flesh procreates the search
for
unredeemed millennia.