Ancient Capital of Images

By (author): John Mateer. John Mateer's fifth poetry collection ranges across South Africa, Australia and Japan, using the idea of an "ancient capital of images" as a metaphor for the poetic imagination itself. Rather than travel writing, the poems turn inward, with the South African section — including "The Kramat of Tuan Guru" and "An Empty Flat," a meditation on his father through the image of "a box of ashes; the family handgun" — read by critics as the collection's most politically and personally charged material.