John
Mateers previous poetry book Southern
Barbarians traced the influence of the Portuguese empire in the Indian
Ocean it was shortlisted for the PMs Award for Poetry and the NSW and
Victorian Premiers Literary Awards. Unbelievers,
or The Moor takes this exploration one step further, to recover its Arabic
and Islamic origins in Al-Andalus, the Moorish state which occupied much of
present-day Spain and Portugal from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. A
seat of learning and culture, which combined Muslim, Christian and Jewish
influences, it provides a model for Mateers own mixed background as a South
African Australian, and for his nomadic identity as a poet. The collection is
much concerned with influential but invisible histories; with the poem as a
moment of connection between languages and cultures, so that it seems already
to exist in translation; with doubles and hauntings, friends in far places, and
above all, what Mateer calls the irony of Elsewhere.
