
Personal Choice 14 - for Helen
who loves Mary Oliver's poetry as much as I do I did not discover Mary Oliver until only a decade or so ago: a small epiphany! Rev. Ruth Mathieson read Wild Geese at College morning prayers and she became an immediate reminder of what poetry is really about and concerned with. In other words, Mary Oliver is for me now a poet to measure my own work against - in an effort to know I am 'on course’. And more importantly to love and have an immediate attachment to her redemptive v

Personal Choice 13
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter after Li Po While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chōkan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times,

Personal Choice 12
Judith Sewing The afternoon crowding upon the windows with much cheerfulness of blue and slanting gold will end too soon. Judith has sewn the collar on a dress that's excellent though old, and, with the needle in her idle fingers, sits and stares, and out beyond the windows sunlight lingers softly on a wall of ancient brick, old-red, and lights the leafless almond-tree with gold. This might go on for ever. I might watch her watching the afternoon, idle and thoughtless; and we

Personal Choice 11
Spring, Chaucer wrote in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, is the time when people begin to stir themselves, and think of going on pilgrimages. The opening lines to the prologue are some of the most powerful writing about spring in English literature – or any literature. It is not gentle writing. Chaucer’s spring is full of restless energy and wildness and violent passions. I don’t want to go on a pilgrimage. I want to stay home. I know that wherever I go, I will find I h

Personal Choice 10
The first song I learned as a very young child at Blair Athol Primary School and later performed at the Adelaide Town Hall as part of the ‘Hundred Voice Children's Choir’ in the early 1950s. Just an exquisite poem of love and separation with a haunting, tender, passionate musical score. What wasn’t there to love as a child more than words and music? Eriskay Love Lilt Traditional: from the Hebrides Islands When I'm lonely, dear white heart, Black the night and wild the sea; By

Personal Choice 9
Travelling through the Dark Travelling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River Road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail light I stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason— her side was warm; her f

Book Launch - Eight Sonnets © by Jeff Guess
Listen@Lunch, Gawler Public Library, August 21st 2022 , 12 - 1pm This Morning This morning the sun like soft yellow, warm delicious butter has covered everything the air is fully laden with golden light and the cologne spray of star jasmine the world is green deep ripe and sweet I pluck the moment and bite the day to its core. Greetings When I say 'Good morning' to the man waiting at the station who reads thick Wilbur Smith books on the train he always says 'Yes - but it won'

Personal Choice 8
Haiku The art of haiku dates from 14th-century Japan and evolved during the Tokugawa period from an earlier kind of linked-verse known as renga and used by Zen Buddhist monks. It began as a literary game or had a comic style of verse that was simple to write. But in the late 1600's, Matsuo Basho (1644 - 94) changed haiku into a serious form of highly refined and conscious art. His haiku, written according to strict rules, presented aspects of nature and contained a reference

Personal Choice 7
In 1964 my parents took me to a production of Henry V at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Organizers for the Festival had erected a huge tent theatre in the Adelaide parklands. John Bell played the part of Henry V. It was a night I would never forget. I had been studying the play at high school and had seen Sir Laurence Olivier in the film but nothing could prepare me for this performance and it was the first staged play I had ever seen. John Bell who was only 24 at the time an

Personal Choice 6
Those Winter Sundays Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well