An Accompanied Solitude

Poetry gathers distances—other voices, other lives, your own abandoned pasts and failed loves, and all those you miss and all that you’d become—and makes of them a hearth. The way a garden in a city is all the gardens in the world. “A Gathered Distance,” the title poem of my latest collection speaks of all this, with the Sydney Botanic Gardens in view. How wonderful, then, to find my book, itself, that gathering of distances, keeping some fine lyric company—Rumi, Plath, Cohen, Larkin, among others—in the poetry section at Berkelouw, Darlinghurst, recently. Now that we’re all allowed out, we may have a long-delayed event to launch A Gathered Distance in Sydney at Berkelouw. Watch this space.

And if you have to be on the bottom shelf, this is not such a bad bottom shelf to hold the the centre of.