John Mateer, Loanwords. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002. ISBN: 1863683593 [Book review]

There is a certain violence to South African born poet John Mateer’s fourth collection of poems to be published in Australia: Loanwords. Or, to be more precise, there is the certainty of violence, a need to bear witness - poetically - to the vicinity of terror. The first poem of the collection is called “The Bombing.” The poet there writes, “We see the aftermath in a sports shoe store / on a TV high against the ceiling … The vicinity is inarticulate.” The poem is about the phenomenon of a terrorist bombing, but a contemporary reader would be forgiven for asking: which “inarticulate vicinity” does the poet here have in mind? The specificity of this question does not seem entirely misplaced. The poem could be post September 11, 2001. It is definitely pre Bali October 12, 2002. For the Australian reader, for whom terror has entered the vicinity, its effect now takes place in the nervous intercultural spacetime opened up by these two dates and by the phenomenon of global terror.