I’m in sunny Portugal at the moment on a bit of a private odyssey. Lots of planning for lots of projects which is also a sunny place to be … but one welcome bit of news was that a poem of mine, Welcome, Swallow is short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2024.
This is a poem that is almost the perfect model of how and when I write poetry as opposed to plays. Very occasionally there is the experience of something coming all in one weird landing of word and thought but mostly a poem will come via an apprehension, a sort of resonance in the head where an image just seems to call a small world of connections into form.
We live in a big old stone house in the southern hills of Adelaide. The bedroom I share with my best beloved is an upper storey one that looks out on a wooden deck that overlooks a ring of soft, Samuel Palmer-like hills. One year a pair of Welcome Swallows came to nest above the outside light above the door out to the deck (maximum inconvenience!). They stayed for two years and raised two years’ worth of chicks. That first year I looked through the glass panel of the door to see a tiny swallow chick heroically clinging to the heavy wood of the balcony rail. A big wind sprang up. S/he was waiting to be fed and seemingly enjoying a first moment of independence but quite unqualified to risk flight. And it’s a long way down the scrub and bush beneath.
So s/he clung there, in her innocent insouciance, with a lifetime of bright darting ahead of her. Or not, if s/he fell. And out of that – eventually – and with many byways because the associations kept gathering and I wanted them to fit with something of the same combination of tenacity and chance – a poem. It’s lovely that the small, crafted thing has ended up on this great list.
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