Book announcement: Transition Vamps!
"You don't have to say you love me, baby; it's all right, coz honey I don't care".
Well, if we’re friends on FB or connected on LinkedIn, you’ve probably already read my posts over there announcing that Cordite Publishing, through its poetry imprint Cordite Books, will release my third full-length collection, Transition Vamps, in 2026.
I’m both excited and relieved to share the news with you here, too. Excited, because it’s not every day that an editor reads your work and says, ‘yes, we’d like to publish this’. And relieved, because it’s been twelve long years since my last collection, Leaves of Glass, appeared in print.
But there’s also a third emotion involved, and that’s closure. Because with the publication of Transition Vamps next year, it feels like some kind of transition in my own life may well be coming to an end.
TRANSITIONS • As a tween in the early 1980s I spent a couple of years at boarding school. It was a weekly arrangement: every Monday morning, I’d travel by car from our dusty wheatbelt village to a Catholic boarding school 50 kilometres away in a new town designed by Walter Burley Griffin. It was too far to travel by bus—and there was no bus, in any case.
A few other kids from my town went to the same boarding school, so there was a carpool arrangement in operation. Someone’s dad would drive us to L— on Monday mornings. Then someone else’s mum would pick us up on Friday afternoons. I remember those drives as long, drawn-out scenes of transition. We’d leave our dry village on the plains in a cloud of dust. Then we’d arrive in the humid air of the larger town, which owed its existence to irrigation, feeling strangely hydrated.
So far, so Gerald Murnane.
Somewhere between these two points, something had changed inside me. I have spent the rest of my life wondering what it was. I now understand that those transitions between home and school, which reoccurred weekly, were partly responsible for what later became moodiness and social withdrawal. Later still, when I learned about panic attacks and hyperventilation, it all started to make more sense. But there was no logic to my thoughts or behaviour at the time.
The series of rituals I created to cope with being at boarding school—or, more accurately, with coming to and going from boarding school—only worked inasmuch as they got me through to the next transition, the following week, when the whole process began again. There was something Kafkaesque about it, although I’d never heard of him. But navigating transitions, and their emotional consequences, remains difficult for me, to this day.
TRANSLATION AS TRANSITION • Transition Vamps staggers, rather than follows, in the footsteps of my two previous full-length poetry collections: Leaves of Glass (2013) and We Will Disappear (2007). Given that I lived in Sweden for eleven years, it’s probably no surprise that a fair number of the poems in Transition Vamps were written there. But the contents of the book also span three decades of transitions in my writing life: from the mid-to-late 2000s in Melbourne, Seoul, Den Haag and Amsterdam, to the 2010s in Karlskrona, Stockholm and Gustavsberg, and the early 2020s in Paris and Fryslân.
It was in Sweden that I returned to self-publishing after a long break, putting together a chapbook of poems, entitled Övergången [The Transition] in October 2011. Most of those poems were not new: in fact, it was a kind of ‘greatest hits’ package I put together when I was invited to attend a poetry festival in Stockholm (a festival which turned out to be a couple of readings to minuscule audiences). But the act of creating the book—putting the text together, choosing the cover and stapling the pages in a copy shop in Södermalm—constituted a kind of transition.
It also helped that poet Boel Schenlaer, whom I’d met at the Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia earlier in the year, together with Linda Bönström, translated the poems in Övergången from English into Swedish. Having spent less than a year in Sweden at that point, it was a strange delight to read my words in that still-alien language: the å with its overring, the ä and ö with their umlauts. Perhaps most startling was realising that the process of translation involved yet another transition. This was most obvious to me in the case of the poem ‘Övergången’.
ÖVERGÅNGEN • ‘Övergången’ is probably the most in-your-face expression of alienation I’ve ever attempted in sonnet form. I was writing a lot of poems in a similar vein at that time but something about the subject and the word itself hit different, if that makes sense. My first experience of the endless daylight of the northern summer had left me delirious, awake half the ‘night’ and drifting in and out of sleep during working hours. The sensation of sleeping in sunlight is strange: one’s whole diurnal rhythm is upset, and you wake feeling as if you’ve just taken a nap, albeit a long one.
They were groggy days in more ways than one. I was drinking excessively, although I wasn’t aware of the fact until much later. Having moved (fled?) to Sweden after three difficult and lonely years living in the Netherlands, my social side overcompensated, using the excuse of interactions with new colleagues and friends to overindulge in beer and whiskey (a liquor I’d never even imbibed before arriving, and which turned me into a fighting drunk, figuratively at least). The apex of this behaviour occurred, unsurprisingly, during midsummer, when we drank snapps for 24 hours.
Also unsurprisingly, my desire to write poetry tapered off very quickly when the glacial process of transition to the endless night of winter began, just six weeks later.
In 2012, around a year after I first published the English version of ‘Övergången’ on my own blog, Australian poet William Fox (who used to tweet as @readism and once ran a Tumblr of the same name) wrote an entry on his site (sadly no longer online) analysing ‘Övergången’. I’ve never met William, I don’t think. So, I was flattered that he’d taken the time to write about a single poem of mine, and also surprised by the perceptiveness of his analysis:
The authoritative voice works well because it gets at how confidently we can trace the narrative of our social successes these days. It’s therefore no surprise that the poem hits the ground running – the opening line is in dactyls that are promptly broken up by a line break & the more awkward phrase ‘very quickly now’. The smoothness of my own commute is always determined by the extent to which I don’t think about how quickly I want to get it over & done with.
On a tram / train this is easily achieved. I think this ‘transition’ is a special case because the poet’s probably walking the streets after dark (‘It’s already too late to plead…’) & more than likely through a city. This makes casual & indifferent mannerisms even more imperative, if only to avoid getting the shit kicked out yourself. It also makes you yearn for the ‘ignorance’ of non-self-consciousness, or to be a ‘special case’ (i.e. to be so deliriously shitfaced that you don’t care if people laugh at you).
TRANSMISSION VAMPS • I’ve always been interested in the idea of books as performances: both of ‘the self’ and of the ritual prerequisites to calling that self a ‘writer’. In my own case, ‘self-publishing’ is more than just the physical act of printing something up and stapling it together. Even ‘proper’ publishing is unavoidably an act of ‘self-performance’: take the author photograph, perhaps snapped from behind or above, the writerly hands posed just so; the mercilessly edited and vetted biography; the tedious tumult of testimonials; the website, book tour and media appearances . . . I could go on.
Of course, this world of ‘proper’ publication and promotion is fading fast, and was only ever accessible to a few writers anyway, that scarcity being what drove aspiring authors to seek out publication in the first place. The genre of poetry publishing—which was the main focus of my own brief stint as an academic in the field of literature—is probably one of the least rewarding, financially, but has developed its own rarefied system of prestige and worth, in which ‘self’-publishing remains just one slippery step above the graveyard of the vanity press.
I don’t see much of a distinction between the books I publish myself and the published collections that I’ve been fortunate to put my name to. They’re all assemblages of individual transmissions, anyway. It’s the poem as vehicle for self-expression that counts. ‘Övergången’, for example, was written in blinding sunlight and posted directly to my website in 2011; translated into Swedish and reprinted in a private chapbook; republished online in Jacket 2 in 2012; analysed by Mr Fox shortly thereafter; and now, twelve years later, about to be reincarnated in book form.
For this reason, my current mood is one of quiet relief and untold excitement: the manuscript is now with the publisher, who will probably suggest a different sequence of order of poems, and that’s totally okay. What a thrill it is to have a new assemblage of thoughts swirling its way towards new readers. The sense of closure I mentioned at the beginning of this post remains deep down, in the vicinity of my navel, but it’s there, all right: a sense that once this book ‘hits’ the shelves (LOL), I’ll be free to move on to other projects, other transmissions.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to launching Transition Vamps and will share further details as they come to hand. As I hope you will soon discover, it’s filled with poems that have gone through linguistic transitions in their long and meandering journeys towards you as readers. As for the ‘vamps’ of the book’s title, well, I’m not actually sure what they have to do with anything, to be honest. I’m not even much of a fan of Transition Vamp, either. But I have been listening to a lot of jazz-vamp instrumentals lately, and they certainly make for very nice chair-dancing music.
As ever, if there’s a specific topic you’d like me to cover in a future post, or a thought you’d like to share, please feel free to leave a comment (if you’re reading on Substack), reply directly to this message (if you’re receiving the newsletter via email) or else contact me the old-fashioned way at davey@daveydreamnation.com.
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All the best and bye for now,
Davey
