'Drawing on memory, understanding, imagination, and the momentary experience, Jurgensen writes movingly of his own, and everyman's lost certainty of comfort. Mother, lover, wife, child, occasional stranger, and separate selves people his poems. They provide him with the images he needs for his exploration of age, illness, death, divorce, and all other separations that prove the unkindness of time, the failures of love and language, the fictional disguises of truth, and the ultimate solitude of being.
As the mark of discovery, they show Jurgensen's journey to have been well rewarded, as the aficionado of serious and thoughtful poetry will be by reading Jurgensen's book.'
(Malcolm Pettigrove, The Canberra Times)
'Manfred Jurgensen, like Robert Adamson,…is a poet who is prepared to strip himself emotionally before his readers and release the self-doubts and moments of black despair that most of us prefer to hide. His obviously very serious commitment to poetry as a means of expressing the reality of his emotions provides a collection that is both haunting and disturbing.'
(Michael Dugan, The Age)
The Skin Trade,
Phoenix Publications,
Brisbane 1983
from: seven days of uncreation
friends call, strangers, the school.
i am invited too.
the world is missing you.
i'm still in control.
mail arrives, offers, bills.
work proves a loyal chore.
time's military drills
make pain itself a bore.
words appear, poems, clues.
you filled your diaries
with shopping lists and cries
for help: your residues.
days emerge, pass, survive.
you left without a fight.
i'm going out to live,
you said, you go and write.
dedication
this binding craft that rhymes like love
i practise with two tongues.
spellbound i taste the echo of
where memory belongs.
for once our speech was a reply,
all senses its reward,
a doubled self of i to i,
our one love's counterpart.
but now we go our separate ways.
our language is composed.
we know not what the other says,
we are an answer lost.
we dare not hear what once we heard.
we live the missing word.
to vincent buckley
we live
as much as we believe;
we love
when faith is not enough.