'signs & voices is the first book of English language poems by a writer whose previous collections have appeared in German: Stationen in 1968, aufenthalte in 1969, and innere sicherheit, concurrently with this one.'
Taken as a whole, signs & voices cuts a progressive curve of experience: intelligent, unusual, and rising at best to a vivid power. The book is a real collection, not merely an assembly of individual pieces. Part of the attraction and difficulty of the poems lies in their character as products of a second language, although their merits glow through and transcend this initial unfamiliarity. Jurgensen's seriousness is not a thing to set apart from his poetry.'
signs & voices,
UQP (Paperback Poets 17),
St. Lucia 1973
a memory
on this, my thirty-first detachment,
your air-mailed echoes will not break.
though father's uniform took cover
when i deserted,
the wall-flowered nursery
and mother's tulips withered in my breath,
i am reborn.
now all my restless beds grow paper.
signing the sheets i give myself away,
unitl i've covered everything
in washed-out diaries and letters
to smells and touches i call mother,
father, to the october afternoon
i locked myself inside the darkroom
developing my first exposure,
certain at last that gradually
the opposite is realised and that
no mirror holds a likeness
another image will not counterfeit.
such fluid truth still dripping from my hands
i burnt the transparent negatives.
you grudgingly paid for the fire-brigade
while i undressed the girl next-door.
two-decades later, in another country,
i recover some of the familiar doubts.
if i undress my manuscripts,
repel your hasty heart-attacks,
set fire to a blown-up image -
would you again raise the alarm?