Photos from a Past Journey

As I mentioned back in December, one of the projects I’m working on this year is to re-publish a chapbook of poems I wrote back in 1993 about my first journey to Europe, a family journey as exciting and as fulfilling as I had always hoped.

The original chapbook was ‘published’ (read typed and photocopied) in a limited edition of twelve. It was mainly poems written on, or just after that trip, and some selected diary entries. It was printed originally in A4, twenty-two pages, individually numbered, two-sided photocopies, spiral bound with a postcard from the journey pasted on the opening page of each copy and given to friends.

The project this year has been to digitise that chapbook, trying to keep as much of the spirit of the original as possible, but making it more available in ebook and paperback format. I’m hoping to have that online by the end of April when I plan to return to Europe, not for the first time since then, but with that journey firmly in mind.

Meanwhile, here’s some of the photographs I took on the trip, some of which I’ll include in the new edition. There’s nothing spectacular about them, or distinctive. But they do, I think, have a certain feel of the ‘time’, obvious places, obvious holiday ‘snaps’ taken on film on my Minolta 303 (pictured below) that I lugged around with me all the way, along with a pasta maker for much of the journey! But that’s another story.

The mini-collection, Us, Falling for It, should be out next month.

The original cover, 1993

The light in Greece

Pont de Gard

Eiffel Tower

Tourists at the Parthenon

The British seaside at Hastings

Trusty Minolta SRT303

My 2022 Books of the Year

My book of the year for 2022 is Orwell’s Roses by Rececca Solnit.

I’ve enjoyed Rebecca Solnit’s work for a while, particularly her earlier book Wanderlust. I think this is even better, a series of essays and a meditation and exploration of gardens, life, death, Orwell, creativity, time and place.

Read the Guardian Review HERE

I also read, and was amazed by, Gravity’s Rainbow, so inaccessible and wonderful, and so different to the breezy prose of Anne Tyler in French Braid. Her insights into family and time have always struck me as true somehow. It was also good to enjoy a new book of poetry again. Kasey Jued’s book has been well reviewed and deservedly so. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was unlucky not to make the list; that was a compelling and at times exasperating read.

As always you can check the READING link of my PoetryPages to see more about my reading over the years and what I’ve enjoyed.

Text version (to paste into your shopping app of choice!

Rebecca Solnit. Orwell’s Roses (NF)
Thomas Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow (F)
Karl Ove Knausgaard: Morning Star (F)
Anne Tyler. French Braid (F)
Kasey Jueds. The Thicket (P)

Robert Adamson and the Spirit of Place

I was saddened to hear last week of the passing of Australian poet, Robert Adamson at the age of 79.

Adamson was a force in Australian poetry, part of the ‘new poetry’ push in the 1960s and 1970s and edited New Poetry magazine for fourteen years. By the time I came across his work, in the early 1980s, he was well established as an important voice in Australian poetry.

Personally, I was particularly drawn to the spirit of place in Adamson’s work, the belief in the importance of the ‘local’ that I have found so often in writers I admire, particularly in his case, the Hawkesbury River region. His writing about landscape and birds has been something I’ve enjoyed most in his work.

This week, after the news, I pulled some of the Adamson books from my collection and re-read some of those poems. I also re-read his memoir of prose and poetry, Wards of the State. They remain impressive work, grounded in the real world, but ‘fishing in a landscape for love’

Selected Poems (A&R, 1978)

The autobiographical memoir, ‘Wards of the State’ (A&R, 1992)

‘Waving to Hart Crane’ (A&R, 1994)

‘The Golden Bird – New and Selected Poems’ (BlackInc 2008)

Goodbye to Twitter

For the last two or three years I’ve opened the day with coffee and Twitter.

Well, email first, and the weather and then the familiar feeds from trusted sources I’ve carefully curated over the years.

News from the Guardian, BBC, the ABC, the Saturday Paper and then links and insights from authors I trust, colleagues, former colleagues, ex-students.

I kept my reading selective, used a twitter client called Tweetbot that got rid of the ads and didn’t see a lot of hate.

But that’s been changing, and the whole experience has felt a lot less stable under new ownership. Increasingly, I felt less and less comfortable with the idea of participating in Twitter and passively endorsing where it seems to be going.

So, like a lot of people, it seems, I’ve moved over to a smaller, more decentralised version that can’t be bought by a megalomaniacal billionaire. Mastodon, specifically the zirk.us server. You can find me there at @warrick_w@zirk.us

Web Work

I spent some time today in tidying up my poetry page and finally grabbing the warrickwynnepoetry.com domain name that WordPress promised me when I went from the ad-free version of that site earlier this year. So, as well as warrickwynnepoetry.wordpress.com I now have warrickwynnepoetry.com

I’ve made the ‘books’ clearer on that site too , with an individual page not only for the three print books but also for two Kindle only editions and the new selected poems (The Other World) I published earlier this year.

I also plan to do another Kindle only electronic chapbook edition of poems about my first trip to Europe with the family, in 1993, early in the new year. More on that later!

Finally, I’ve tinkered a little with my Amazon Author Page to make sure that it’s all working and that the blog posts made here are reflected on that page to keep it topical. Below is what the Amazon page looks like.

Next thing for me is working out my annual Book of the Year awards; always a challenge and always a nice signifier of the end of the year. I don’t think I’ll quite make my goal of 40 books read this year, but I’m looking forward to revisiting what I read, and what I enjoyed most. I’ll post that list here soon. Meanwhile, click through to READING on this page for a quick summary of all the previous winners or check out the warrickwynnepoetry site if you’d like to dig deeper on my favourite books over the last eighteen years!

Balcombe Creek after rain

After 75mm of rain in the last day or so I took the opportunity to see how the local creek had responded. Balcombe Creek runs down from the slopes of Mt Eliza and is usually a slow moving flow. Yesterday morning it looked more like a river, running into Port Phillip Bay and discolouring the bay with the sediment and soil washed out.

It was nice to be able to get outside for a few hours after a very wet week.

Upstream, the moving, swirling water flows to the bay.