AustLit

Dedication: Dear S. (In memoriam John Douglas Anderson, 1948 - 1977)

'A young friend of mine has died, / and he has left me a book of poems, / to keep me alive and make / my world new again / in courage, wonder and such / hope that, once more, / I can believe in love and / think of you this morning / and turn / to thank him.'

Dedication: For S '...that particular silence / as colour seeps into the / edges of a washed-out world'.

Epigraph: 'The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing - even fugitively - in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant.' Mircea Eliade.