Injury Time
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"This book finds James with more time on the clock than he had anticipated, and all the more determined to use it wisely – to capture the treasurable moment, and think about how best to live his remaining days while the sense of his own impending absence grows all the more powerfully acute. In a series of intimate poems – from childhood memories of his mother, to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight – James declares ‘family’ to be our greatest blessing. He also writes beautifully of the Australia where he began his life, and where he hopes to 'reach the end'. Throughout Injury Time, James weaves poems which reflect on the consolation and wisdom to be found in the art, music and books which have become ever more precious to him in his last years."
"The poems in this moving, inspirational and unsentimental book are as accomplished as any he has ever written; indeed the unexpected gift of James's Injury Time shows him to be in the form of his life" Peter Craven, The Australian |
Extracts
The Gardener in White
The Reaper sobers you. You will be stirred
By just how serious you tend to get
When he draws near and has his quiet word.
His murmur is the closest you’ve heard yet
To someone heavy calling in a debt.
No gun, no flick-knife: none of that gangster thing.
Just you, him, and the fear that you might die,
As the fluff-ball tern chick under its mother’s wing
Senses the black-back gull in the clear sky,
And shivers from the knowledge in its blood.
The end of life is like a flower’s bud
Formed from the code of its unfolding bloom,
Which carries, in its turn, the burst of light
That lies ahead, the blinding crack of doom
When petals in the rain are shaken dry
By the Whisper of the Gardener in White.
The Reaper sobers you. You will be stirred
By just how serious you tend to get
When he draws near and has his quiet word.
His murmur is the closest you’ve heard yet
To someone heavy calling in a debt.
No gun, no flick-knife: none of that gangster thing.
Just you, him, and the fear that you might die,
As the fluff-ball tern chick under its mother’s wing
Senses the black-back gull in the clear sky,
And shivers from the knowledge in its blood.
The end of life is like a flower’s bud
Formed from the code of its unfolding bloom,
Which carries, in its turn, the burst of light
That lies ahead, the blinding crack of doom
When petals in the rain are shaken dry
By the Whisper of the Gardener in White.