09/09/2025
The Ease of Eggs, Benjamin Dodds’s third collection, will be launched at Benledi House, Glebe, on 28 September, by Debbie Lim. Registration is now open:
https://www.5islandspress.com/event-details/book-launch-the-ease-of-eggs
In this book, Dodds finds the uncanny in the quotidian world, offers you a pair of Havaianas at midnight, extends a hand and asks you to join him.
The world Dodds witnesses and recalls in these tidy, playful lyric poems has a dignity and courtesy and unexpected kindness; there is casual violence and there are bodily functions; you stub your toe on the grotesque, the bizarre and the angular. Life goes the way one knows it in the burbs, but slower and a little quieter and more brightly lit; the contrast is high, the tone nostalgic and the set designs are trim and gorgeous.
Dodds’s poems are alert for the strange and quietly ecstatic inside the ordinary. The moments he manifests beguile and surprise; nothing feels quite the way it looks. His moments, though often everyday, shimmer, their past lives climbing out of their present incarnations: the difficult birth of a calf, a night walk in thongs, a ghosting or two, the dying of a dog, the bullying of a child, the drama of a bird in a classroom, the recollection of a mother’s bra, a science experiment, the arrival of rain to a suburban (strata title) balcony, two weeks with an antique stove, an afternoon in a natural history museum.
Dodds sees with a kindly eye, ready for mischief, alert for trouble, happy to help. The tenderness and acuity of his seeing, the playfulness of his shaping and the carefulness of his saying seem to invite a reader to compassion and gratitude and service. Nothing the poet preaches; just the lesson you might draw from the way he stands present in his life and world.
Find out more about this brilliant new book from the catalogue page on our website.
https://www.5islandspress.com/catalogue
