Learning not to Touch |
Reaching for a Stranger |
Outstripping Gravity |
Exposures |
Taking Cover |
No Time for Roses |
Wish |
Refuge |
Rainbow |
Woodsy |
Here and Now |
Bridging the Gap |
WIISH Q&A |
Preface |
Excerpts |
Outline |
Narrative |
Excerpts |
Preface |
Why Verse? |
Why a Late Starter? |
15 Years on in 2010 |
Reflections on Refuge |
Short Essays A - E |
Short Essays F - K |
Short Essays L - Z |
Long Essays |
Valentine Ackland |
Gary Allen |
Gillian Allnut |
John Ash |
Wendy Bardsley |
Anne Beresford |
Roy Blackman |
Wayne Burrows |
Sue Butler |
Ian Caws |
Peter Dale |
Simon Darragh |
Dick Davis |
Lauris Edmond |
John Fuller |
Judy Gahagan |
Ivy Garlitz |
Desmond Graham |
Joanna Guthrie |
Robin Hamilton |
James Harpur |
Selima Hill |
Mike Jenkins |
Peter Kane-Dufault |
Judith Kazantzis |
Mimi Khalvati |
Carol Ann Duffy |
R.S.Thomas |
Anne Beresford |
J.Pearce |
BBC TV Series |
Learning not to Touch |
Outstripping Gravity |
Exposures |
Taking Cover |
No Time for Roses |
Here and Now |
JRRT Autobiographical Lecture |
Fantasy Lecture |
Eden, Fall, Exile, and Beyond |
On Fairy Stories and MT's Rainbow |
Amphitheatre (Rockingham Press)
(Publ in Ambit 147: 1997)
An exuberant first collection. I warmed to its concern for the losers and ignored
among people and creatures. Subjects include the phantasmagorical (a haunting by
Heathcliff and a divine rape), speculation over art ( a sequence about a South Australian
exhibition), 'scientised' values, and affectionate observations. Form is inventively
diverse, but the more ambitious poems indulge in leaps of focus, a contrived impressionism
that confuses rather than challenges, as if the poet attempts too many angles on
her theme. And in case we're missing the point, there are lashings of rhetorical
questions and exclamations. 'Weeds' purports to be about a Triffid-
I cannot fight their pale etherial might.
'Words for a Sick Child', too, is a misnomer; it's more about avoiding the spectacle in favour of cloying 'special effects'.
This impression of experience being played with rather than engaged in, or poems falling short of the conflicts and perspectives they explore, may derive from uncertainty of 'voice'. When this is resolved, we can look forward to work like the evocative description of Rose, the aborigine, and the controlled detail, wit and anxious silences of 'Perforated Ulcer' about the hospitalising of a hypochondriac who tabulates his own deterioration.
Wendy Bardsley