Earlier Verse
If it does not sound too grand to say there was an initial phase in my sixty years of writing verse, it was the ten-year period in which I wrote what were meant to be lyric poems. These mainly went into university magazines and newspapers either in Sydney or in Cambridge, and in the pages of those publications most of them demand to lie undisturbed. Though I never had what it took to be obscure, clarity still had to be worked for. Local outbreaks of straightforwardness from the early part of this struggle were here preserved under the title 'Earlier Verse', not because I wanted to disown them but because even at their most transparent they try so hard to disown me. To write in his own voice is every poet's object, and my voice, I have since realised, was the prosaic one I speak with. It was so close to hand that it took an age to reach.
- As I See You
- The Deep Six
- Berowra Waters, New South Wales
- The Morning from Cremorne, Sydney Harbour
- The Lady in Mourning at Camelot
- Four Poems about Porpoises
- The Banishment
- The Crying Need for Snow
- The Glass Museum
- The Young Australian Rider, P.G. Burman
- A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky*
- The Outgoing Administration
- Le Cirque Imaginaire at Riverside Studios
- Neither One Thing nor Another