Four Plots for Magnets

Wordsworth comes to mind with Luke Davies: 'We poets in our youth / begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end / despondency and madness.' We already know of the despair, of the decade he spent as a heroin addict, unproductive and self-destructive, an experience he later chronicled in his best-selling junkie romance, Candy, which was turned into a film starring Heath Ledger. Here, however, in Davies' first book of poems, now reissued after 31 years, we also see the gladness, bright flourishes and happy obsessions of a carefree 20-year-old . . . This is a rambling, ranting, occasionally rhapsodic, jumble of kids' stuff. Arguably the best thing in it is his new introduction to the volume, an endearing portrait of the artist as a teenage pot baron. You can see him striding along, a battered copy of Apollinaire hanging ostentatiously from a jacket pocket, the acrid funk of bong smoke still in his hair, and with the self-satisfied smirk of a young man, only 19, who has just written the line ''lately and (lightly also) we travel'' and knows it's pretty good. These plots, then, are a kind of map of the ecstasies and romances of the young poet, and if the madness to come throws a shadow of menace over our reading of his passions and wishes, there is at least the promise in them of the artist's ultimate redemption, as well as his latter-day maturity. (excerpts from Andrew Fuhrmann' review in the Fairfax press 25th August 2013)