The First Book of Poetry I Purchased

This Place

This Place might have been the first book of poetry that I purchased. I have a battered copy of a Penguin John Donne collection that I might have bought when I was in high school, but I am not sure if it was then or later. Whatever the case, This Place was the first book I ever bought of modern or contemporary poetry and it had a major impact on me as a writer. The book was published by Nimrod, a publishing house that was run by English lecturer Norman Talbot from the University of Newcastle. I had encountered Norman in my final year at high school during a HSC study day at the university and he was known to one of my friends whose father was also a lecturer in English and a poet.

The importance of This Place was, for the first time in my life I could read a book of poetry written by people from my community, some of whom I had met, and they were writing about places and things that I knew. 

I thought about this book in the last week when I was asked to contribute a couple of paragraphs for the upcoming Poetry at the Pub anthology in remembrance of the poet and community activist Jean Talbot who had recently passed away. Jean was a long-time member of Poetry at the Pub, the widow of Norman Talbot and one of the poets featured in This Place. I re-read Jean’s poems for the first time in many years and they still spoke to me, as did a lot of the poems. Norman was a good friend, critic and mentor in my early days writing poetry and is sadly missed, as will Jean also be missed.

Visions from the Valley

What I didn’t know, all those years ago, as a young man working at the steelworks was that twenty years later another anthology of Hunter Valley poetry would be published that included many of the poets featured in This Place like Jean and Norman Talbot, Paul Kavanagh, Chris Pollnitz and Cliff Hanna, but also included some younger poets who had emerged since 1980 and that I would be included amongst them. Visions from the Valley was a selection chosen by the late Donald Moore and he drew a number of poems from the annual Poetry at the Pub Anthologies.

Brew

Almost twenty years after Visions from the Valley was published, Poetry at the Pub was preparing to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary and, as part of that celebration, another fine local poet, Dael Allison, edited an anthology to celebrate PATP and this was called Brew, and I had some poems included there as well.

What a long strange trip it’s been!

It is interesting to reflect a little on my own journey over more than forty years from the day in 1980 when I walked into McDonald’s booksellers in High Street in Maitland and purchased This Place, through to publishing my own slim volume of poetry, The Saxophone Injuries in 1991, numerous other journals and publications that I have had work published through to my first novel A Long the River Run this year. I like to think my writing has gotten better over that time but also don’t want to lose the excitement I felt in realising that there were great things being written in and about my own community.

I heard a snippet of poetry on television the other night that was familiar, but it took me a little while to remember its source. It was a couple of lines from one of my favourite poets, T.S. Eliot and came from Little Gidding, one of his four quartets.

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time’.