Paul Carter, The Abandoned Room

Forthcoming September 2025

The Abandoned Room is a diary of historical and personal homelessness. The title refers to Der Verlassene Raum, a Kristallnacht memorial located in central Berlin, whose bronze table and two chairs point to ‘the irretrievable losses that occurred when a people, their way of life and their culture went missing’. In five seven poem sequences, the enigma of loss is twinned with the necessity (and the impossibility) of return. Following Maurice Blanchot’s advice, the archaeology of disaster is discovered in the ‘sovereignty of the accidental’. The enigma of return is expressed in the character of Heinrich Schliemann, finder-destroyer of Troy, reincarnated in Berlin as a tramp collecting radio sets. The difficulty of letting go is explored through the ending of a relationship. The difficulty of finding home (a speaking place) emerges in the pressure put on poetic form: lines are stumbling stones, juxtaposing observation of minutiae with incursions into the collective haunting. The question of distance (the migrant condition) is at the heart of these poems. The resulting voice is polyphonic, the syncopated rhythms and free juxtaposition of images drawn from different worlds, channeling an identity under pressure. Finished in Australia, these poems map underworlds joined by histories of denial.

‘In this virtuoso collection Paul Carter ruminates on and queries sensuous, aesthetic and cultural inhabitation and abandonment. The poems trace the sometimes subtle and sometimes brutal architectures of everyday rooms and spaces, their furniture, walls and borders, and memories, and shows how poetry might open passages through various darknesses of history, myth and circumstance. It is by turns personal, social and ethical, and the European setting is no accident, invoking old and new wars, emergency, jeopardy, disappearances, illusion and survivor guilt. Its serious yet often tender intelligence traverses a shifting web of selves, via encounter, modern memory and ancient resonances, replete with inventories of many things including desks, drawers, linen, a chainsaw, gloves, chairs, an Aeolian harp, animals such as antelopes, gannets and greyhounds, and tellingly, ‘smoke from a chimney’. The formal order of the poems is an architecture itself, setting up a performative space where the repressed can disrupt and reassemble. These compelling and haunting poems expand the lyric’s potential to envisage how to continue living in the small and large rooms and places of the world or how and what we may have to leave.’  Jill Jones

Paul Carter’s well-known books include The Road to Botany Bay (1987, 2010), Material Thinking (2004, 2010) and, more recently, Translations, an autoethnography (2021) and Naming No Man’s Land (2024). Selected radio works are hosted by Performance Research (Wales), also publisher of Absolute Rhythm, works for minor radio (2020). Amplifications (Bloomsbury 2019) is a personal account of poetic migration and auditory memory. He has composed and designed many language-based public artworks (Federation Square, Melbourne, Sydney 2000 Olympics and Yagan Square, Perth). Poetic texts for these commissions are recomposed in Signature (2019). Return of the Centaur: a Field Guide (Artem, Naples) features Paul’s drawings and fictions. His previous volume of poems, Ecstacies and Elegies, was published by UWAP in 2013.

Paul Carter, The Abandoned Room
September 2025. 148mm x 210mm. 96pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-80-2