I delighted to announce a Newcastle launch for my new collection of poetry One River at MacLeans Books in Beaumont Street Hamilton on the Thursday 21st of March at 6pm. Joining me will be Ed Wright my editor at Puncher &Wattmann, and Newcastle poet Maggie Ball. Maggie will interview me about the One River, its origins and the process of writing it. Please book with Macleans if you plan to attend. Wine and cheese will be provided courtesy of MacLeans.

One River is a series of haibun studies of the Hunter River and its tributaries. The haibun is a Japanese form of prose punctuated by haiku. In this instance, the longer, but still brief, Korean sijo are employed as lively sketches of the birds, trees, weather and waterways I encountered in my wandering. As I put it in the introduction to the collection—

…the sijo in their relative compression are analogous to a river rapids—or the quick-step that’s the banter of a brook—and on the other hand, the prose in its amplitude has more in common with the wider, calmer reaches of a stream.

The heart of this book are unique meditations on the river and its hinterland. In their whimsical complexity—and leaps of imagination—they are an immersive experience, inviting the reader to find a sense of flow in the limber movements of poems that follow water falling.

One of the joys of writing this collection was giving myself permission to write an introduction and an epilogue; an opportunity to expand in essay form upon the nature of my experiences on the river and how they translated into poetry. Here is an excerpt from Beginnings (the title of the introduction).

I also harboured a notion that walking with the river would align with a perennial feeling I have, that the process of imagining and writing poetry itself takes the form of a river, one which belongs to the geography of my interior.