*** New Book: Thank Seven*** and other news

I’ve just published my seventh collection of verses from this blog: Thank Seven.

I’ve given copies to family and friends, and I can now announce the book’s existence without anyone spending good money on something they were going to get for free.

The book is available from Amazon, or at any number of bookshops. Readings has a warning that the book ‘may be self-published’ so buyer beware, a warning I endorse.

You can buy a copy from lulu.com or direct from me by clicking on this button::

There’s information about all six books, plus my chapbook published by Gininderra Press, None of us Alone, on my Publications page.

In other news, I was interviewed by Emily Stewart for a piece she wrote for the Sydney Review of Books about Damien White, whose short stories she came across in a collection of Frank Moorhouse’s papers. Emily’s article, Cardboard Constructions, is a lovely dialogue between generations – Damien, a fine writer who died too early and Emily, also a fine writer some four decades younger. Damien has cropped up on this blog a number of times. Here’s a little verse he inspired a while back, first on my blog here, and included in my collection Take Five),

On waking from a dream of a friend
who has been dead for many years

You left a note and neatly folded
clothes beside the famous cliff;
left the life and loves you'd shouldered;
vanished. But you left a whiff
of disbelief, and time's a traitor:
someone found you decades later,
now not Damien but Bob,
in Tassie with a uni job.
No note this time, a rope your chosen
tool: your mother mourned you twice.
This time there was no artifice.
Yet last night to my dream, unfrozen,
fugitive from death you came,
with warnings not to say your name.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.