James Charlton’s award-winning poetry collection, Luminous
Bodies, was published by Montpelier Press in 2002. He is poetry editor of the Australian literary quarterly, Island, published in Tasmania. He is also advisory editor for Australasia of Chautauqua Literary Journal, a journal of poetry, prose, reviews and criticism sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Charlton was recently the recipient of a $25,000 grant from the Australia Council's Literature Board.
His poetry is "flaring with incandescence" (Christopher Bantick). It offers “a state of affirmation and self-transformation … a means to the ineffable, to a new oneness with the world. (Philip Harvey).
The cover of Charlton's collection, Luminous Bodies, quotes Judith
Beveridge: "Charlton's voice is both finely tuned and resolute, and
he is a most necessary poet for our times."
Amanda Lohrey notes a debt to Eastern non-dualism, and writes: "Charlton's poems are poems-of-spirit and poems of a clearly seen material world: a ‘true' materialism …".
Anne Kellas reviews Charlton in these terms: "He makes new connections; he takes the hidden life and describes it in lines as light as a butterfly. Not many dare to use such words as ‘spirit' and 'soul' in poetry these days. In Luminous
Bodies, these words fit easily alongside the 'real'. Things are made present and made visible in a new way as the poet writes with, one feels, the spirit's eyes. In Truganini's Soliloquy, we almost see the 'All-Encompasser':
"One who inhabits the wind,
without being it; One who dwells
within the cutting grass, but isn't botanical."
Geoff Page, writing in Australian Book
Review, identifies Charlton's Imagist propensity as
one which "… is primarily interested in the
interaction of the finite and the infinite. … His
metaphysical apprehensions emerge from scrupulous attention
to detail. … His love poetry celebrates the integration
of the lovers with the physical world (and thus, for him,
metaphysical) as well as their mutual love and interaction."
[To Charlton's poems]
