AustLit

'1904: a time of stability and hope. In a little Methodist chapel in country NSW, shy, reserved Albert marries confident, emotional Ethel. Both of them are twenty four. Four years later, at the bride's family home in Sydney, shy, reserved Eva marries handsome, confident Victor, seven years her junior. 1969: a time of change and unrest. One of their grandchildren, confident, emotional Hugh, is married in Oxford to a reserved woman seven years older than he is. The pattern has begun to repeat... As Hugh's life unfolds, the family themes of difference and belonging, ambition and failure, faith and doubt will play out all over again, often in startlingly literal ways. This is a family history like no other, focusing squarely on the way that families mysteriously repeat the same patterns of personality and behaviour, generation after generation.'   (Publication summary)

'The earliest poems I produced were fierce jabs at the many things that irritated me about the world in which I now lived. Some of them have survived in the section of this volume that I’ve called Aspirational Lifestyles. Others (Nacht und Nebel) were responses to the harsh beauty of the upper Blue Mountains, where my wife and I have lived for the past seventeen years. An increasing number (Dream Country) took their inspiration from the cinema of the unconscious (I sometimes wake from dreams with intriguing images, and a line or two that later turns into a poem). But most of all, I found myself writing about old age (Towards Winter). It’s not a popular subject for writers generally, nor is it likely to find a wide audience among younger readers, who are understandably reluctant to look too closely at what is to come.' (Publication Summary)