Rearview Mirror: Retrospective poetry 1970-2001
This anthology ranges randomly across fifty years, from the 1970s until the early 2000s and contains a variety of poetic themes and styles and ideas.
 
I wrote poems prolifically from around age eight, most of them Australian bush themed and some naively political. A handful were published in school magazines. They were modelled heavily on the rhythmic and rhyming patterns of Australian bush ballads.
 
At university I was introduced to the Liverpool Poets and US Beat poetry, and I modified my style accordingly. And then later came Bruce Dawe and similar poets whose subject matter was contemporary politics and suburban life.
 
There was a point in my life when I dreamt that I would be a poet and Keats-like I would live a brief but inspirational life, and die tragically, leaving wise words behind for the ages. I was nineteen.
 
By twenty-one, I had a solitary poem published in a BHP/Fellowship of Australian Writers anthology, Neon Signs to the Mutes, and a wall of rejection slips from poetry magazines. I was alive, but the poet was dying.
 
After I graduated as an English teacher, writing poetry became an activity when I was showing students a variety of ways to construct poems so that they could create and perform poetry and publish their own anthologies. The writing was fun. The outcome for the students was sensational.
 
In my late thirties, the poet metamorphosed into a fantasy and young adult novelist. The legacy of writing poetry was that it taught me to listen to the rhythm of language, spoken and written, and to search for the right word in the right moment.
 
Ultimately, this anthology is a project of ego, but I wanted to capture a part of who I was and still might be. I hope you find words and ideas in here that resonate with a part of you.