A Poem in the Family
RECENTLY, I had an email from Mark Ulyseas. Now there’s a name: a maker, a marker, a traveller. His name an Odyssey.
Mark is the editor of a pioneering online magazine of poetry and letters: Live Encounters. I appeared in those pages a year or so ago, when Denise O’Hagan edited an antipodean issue. And now here was Mark was inviting me to submit poems for the issue of April 2022.
I sent Mark six poems, one of them brand new, the rest of them recent poems that will appear in A Beginner’s Guide, my fifth collection, out in this May. I wouldn’t have sent them if I hadn’t rated them all my best work. One of them was a poem I wrote for my mother on her eighty-fifth birthday on 2 February this year; another I had written for my father’s ninetieth birthday in October last year. And those were the two Mark chose. I hadn’t anticipated that, and I hadn’t intended to be so filial, but how good it feels now to see those poems—odes to my parents, to their lives, to parenthood—appearing side by side in the magazine.
It felt good, too, to be able to share the publication of the poems with Mum and Dad. I am privileged, at sixty, to have both of them alive still and living close to me. As it happens, too, my mother has liver cancer and may not have nearly long enough left with us here on earth. All the more reason, then, to be glad to watch her read “But the world, in truth,/ Is made of music, begun again by every lyric act—a mother’s/ Moves so many among them—/ and devotion is the divination of the real. / Your days a sacred music, then, and a pastoral air or two./ A phosphorescence, like a happy cipher, that goes on.” (Mum is a musician, in particular an organist and singer and conductor.) How good, then, to watch her turn a page and read —“If I could hold my father’s heart,/My hand would be a garden bed,/ And all the years he’s turned, the art/ He’s practised on the plants, might shed—/ Like leaves, or evening light—some truth/ More true than most of what’s been said”—words in which Mum hears her son speak his love and thanks for Bruce, the poet’s father—for Bruce, her own husband of sixty-five years.
Mum’s lifetime of service to students and choirs and churches, to sacred music, and music as community, earned her this year an Order of Australia Medal, which she’ll have conferred on 17 May. A life very well achieved, Mum. Love and music and service and beauty from start to finish.
I’ve put the poems side by side, too, in A Beginner’s Guide. And I’ve dedicated the book to my parents. Like many writers, most of my life has been an attempt to arrive in, and encounter the world from, my one and only life. I have not been unduly filial in my writing to date. One could say I’ve turned to my folks, in gratitude and celebration, not a moment too soon. I’m glad I got there. Love to you, Mum and Dad. I have you to thank for my life, a thing I wouldn’t have missed for quids.
https://issuu.com/liveencounters/docs/le_poetry_writing_spring_april_2022issuu/222
