Falling for it in 1993

The small poetry collection Us, Falling for It, that I’ve mentioned here before is now online and available in Kindle format from my Amazon author page HERE

In 1993, I took long service leave from teaching and headed overseas for the first time, with my wife and two small daughters. We planned a trip through some of Greece, Italy, France, England and Ireland.

During the trip I kept notes for poems that were later assembled in a small collection for close friends and family. That self-published chapbook, completed at the end of the journey, is published here more widely for the first time.

Why publish now a self-published chapbook thirty years old that was ‘published’ in an edition of twelve copies? After all, as I wrote at the time in the introduction: ‘This booklet is not meant to stand the withering scrutiny or critical judgements of strangers’. As a young teacher and writer trying to establish my voice as a poet, I lacked the confidence to look further than family and friends. However, I’m less concerned now about ‘withering scrutiny’ and see things here that others might enjoy.

What I liked about the collection, looking at it again after all these years, besides the memories of a wonderful journey as a family, was the wide-eyed innocence at it all. I knew at the time that I’d been seduced by these first impressions; it’s implicit in the title ‘us falling for it’, but at the same time those first impressions were real, vivid and lasting.  I was more than willing to be taken in. It felt like these impressions could be shared more widely.

The collection is $5AUD on the Kindle store. I hope that readers enjoy it. I’m heading back to Europe in a new few weeks for the first time since 2018. I hope that I still have the ability to fall in love with it all again, and some new poems come of it.

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!

Planning for a Selected Poems

I’ve spent some time over the past few months planning a ‘selected poems’ based on poems from my three published collections and some new work. The idea is to collect together the ‘best’ poems from those original books and make them accessible in a new format. This will be something I’ll publish myself and make available in a Kindle edition and a paperback.

The process began with a look back at the original collections and choosing the poems from them that resonated most with me now. It’s a challenging thing to do at times, especially given that my first book was published thirty years ago, in 1992. They are different poems to what I’m writing now and I’ve resisted the impulse to re-do them as I work through them, and have left them in their original state.

Some of the work has involved actually typing up the poems from the hard cover book version; in some cases the poems have not been digitalised at all or were originally in some early computer format, perhaps on an Apple II, that has long since disappeared. The book will also include some ‘new’ work published since the third collection.

The cover will incorporate an image of Atlantis from an early edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (edition unknown, if any Jules Verne fans could shed any light on what edition it was, I’d appreciate it). It’s an image I’ve had framed in my study for many years. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of Atlantis and considered using the image for my first book Lost Things & Other Poems. In some ways, Atlantis is the original lost thing. It also connects nicely with the title I’ve been working on: The Other World: New and Selected Poems

I’m looking forward to finalising the project by the end of this month and will announce details here then.

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Flying Poems

I’ve put together a little e-chapbook of some poems about flying, some old, some new. Looking back at my poetry over a number of years, I was surprised to see the wonder and joy of flight has interested me for so long. It’s on AMAZON at the bargain price of $4.99 in the Kindle Store.

I’ve got another couple of mini-collections that I intend to publish in Kindle format in the first half of this year, so if you’re not interested in flying, maybe something else later on will get your attention. You can read more about the ‘Flying’ poems below:

 

Notes on the ‘Flying Poems’

The poems in this mini-collection are all based around flight and flying, something which has always fascinated me, and I’ve mixed up some photographs and sketches in all that too.
Here’s a brief outline of what’s in the selection.

The first poem is ‘Tullamarine Gothic’, a poem that tries to recapture the gothic glory of flying before it became all laminex. Tullamarine is the name of the airport in Melbourne.

‘Prom Bird’ is an imagist piece on the Superb Blue Wren, a beautiful bird often seen at Wilson’s Promontory where I spend some time very summer.

Bats couldn’t be more different to the beautiful blue wren but there’s something beautify and fascinating flight of these big fruit bats that come up from the river every night, so ‘Bats’ is next.

‘Eight Swans’ is a little bit inspired by the Sufjan Stevens song ‘Seven Swans’ and a little bit inspired by the birds themselves, flying high over Port Phillip Bay one night.

‘Swallow’ is another short, quick poem that tries to capture the elusive flight of the swallow as it flits over water.

‘Blocked’ is based on that thud you sometimes hear, when a bird has flown into a window of your house and found it’s path blocked.

When the kids were little I got really interested in kites and we flew them a lot. ‘Kite Flying’ is about the tug of the wind in your hand.

‘Fronts’ describes that jolting feeling you get sometimes in an aeroplane when you hit turbulence and wonders where that turbulence comes from.

Clayton is pretty ugly and industrial, mostly. In ‘Flying Over Clayton’ I felt like I was flying through an alien landscape.

‘Flying Over Europe’ is inspired by a recent trip to Spain. From the air Europe seems a landscape without national borders.

Earlier in 2013 I went to Malaysia and wrote ‘Flying Over Australia’. You seem to fly over Australia forever, and if you have a window seat, you can be hypnotised by the surreal landscape below you.

I love looking at the little map on flights, seeing where you are. On one flight we flew over Borneo and I looked down and saw it. I knew the word ‘Borneo’ because my grandfather went there to fight the Japanese in World War II. And there it was; that’s ‘Flying Over Borneo

In ‘Flying Over American’ I was captivated by the clarity of the landscape and the American names, which are so familiar to those of who grew up with American movies and songs.

‘Flying Over Malaysia’ is more about a brief conversation with the taxi driver than the flight itself.

The final poem in the selection, ‘On the Beauty of Airliners’, like the opening poem, laments the passing of style and elegance in our notions of flight. I do think airliners are strangely beautiful; I’m always amazed they can fly.