Pencilled Lines on Poetry: Notes from a loose-leaf pad is a blog-like series of informal jottings and reading notes that includes original material as well as translations; quotes; ideas on East-West poetry & poetics; Chinese Calligraphy; etc ...

Swift Is The Sound Of The Arrow

Originally published in: The Irish Review. 21 (1997) 120. Reprinted with slight variations: Contemporary Review. 272 (1999) 195

Migrant Tongue: Battos in Australia

Between emigrate and
immigrate you are a migrant
one whose tongue is not understood

The cycle of prose-poems ‘Migrant Tongue: Battos in Australia’ reflects on migrant experience with language/s, and weaves Classical and Aboriginal mythology with events in Australia that inaugurated the 21^st Century (the detention of asylum seekers), which forms the central theme of the cycle of 7 poems. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (at one time attributed to Hesiod) the thieving new-born Hermes implores Battos:

not to have seen what you saw
not to have heard what you heard

from Rome River Poems

A selection of poems in Italian written in 1999-2000 whilst a Fellow of the Swiss Institute in Rome/Istituto Svizzero di Roma

Feitio Rede De Palavra

The prose/poem ‘Feitio Rede De Palavra’ (making nets of words) was inspired by a sojourn on the northern coast of Portugal in 1994, in the company of a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

(O-one — O-one)

Unpublished extract