... through slow-turning days ...

By Peter Burges

... through slow-turning days ... is Peter Burges' first collection of poems. The collection consists of a wide range of poems that touch upon family, himself, as well as the people, cultures, religions, histories, ideologies and places he has experienced throughout his life, and which are, as Shane McCauley puts it in the Foreword, "vividly distilled in many of the poems in this diverse, profoundly thoughtful, moving and frequently surprising collection".

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543985474

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Copyright © 2019 by Peter Burges

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed Attention: Permissions at [e-mail].

Printed in the United States of America

Publisher: BookBaby

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877-961-6878

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Ordering Information:

eBook & POD Distribution: [e-mail]

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Burges, Peter.

… through slow-turning days …

p. cm.

eBook ISBN 978-1-54398-547-4

1. The main category of the book —Poetry

HF0000.A0 A00 2010

299.000 00–dc22 2010999999

First Edition

14 13 12 11 10 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover: ‘Seascape’ by Annette Orr (2019)

for my parents, Bert and Marie

my sister Margaret

and my brothers Michael and Alan

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

… through slow-turning days …

Our Tree

The Recidivist

Your Sun-on-the-stubble Smile

Doppelgangers

Behind Each Kiss

Tantra for a Budgerigar

You

Jonquils

The Call of a Gull

Chicks

Doubt

Evening Before My Sister’s Wedding

Exhibition: The Lovers

Valentine for an Ex

A Thorn, too

And Yet I Linger

Selfies

… through slow-turning days …

Thus is the Heart

Sunday with My Cousin

Body Surfing: Winter

… to a fugue pulling life ajar …

How Many Illusions … ?

Refractions from a Swan Mobile

A Sydney Scene: 1970

Collage: ‘Mise-en-scène’

Toilet Repairs

Awakenings

It Should Be Simple

Through A Child’s Eye

Suitcases

Solitude in Petersham

A Sydney Scene 2

Heaven’s Hounding

An Evening Prayer

Gateways Between Here and There

A Haida Raven

Hat Yai Station

Godbole

Thanks A Million, Han-Shan!

At Varanasi’s Ghats

Bardo 1: Bird on Asphalt

Impulses

nothingness

Bardo 2: The Shaman

… to the Glitterband …

Glitterband

… where colours shrivel …

A Beetle and a Flower

Hey, Walt Whitman

A Foo Moon

Inversion

On Hearing of the Death of Norma Fahey

Absence

When Eyes Are Closed

Death of a Homeless Youth

Of Dusks and Suicide

Upon the Death of a Friend

When I Died

Was it Me Sang Your Death?

In Death, No Strangers

Last Moments

Loss

A Second Apocalypse

The Bees Are Dying

Madonna and Child

Gaza 2009

Black May 1992, Bangkok

Of Children, Ashing

Locus Amoenus

News from the Middle East

A Post-Uluru Consciousness

Wadjemup 2018

The Notification

… then thrive again …

Temple Dawn

Stairs, This Life

Pond

Summer Dawn

Plane Tree Leaf

Self

Home by a Nose

At Threetenty-three

Night

Autumn

Natural as Wind

Solo for Double Bass

On Such Days

Conversations 1: In a Coffee Shop

Doing A Leunig …

Conversations 2: Child, Aged About 5

Of Poets and Poems

Memes

Siva Child

A Guangzhou Christmas

Morning Walk

A Day at Tintern

Dawn

Flame Tree After Rain

Foreword

Peter Burges has been a great traveller, 30 years spent working in Thailand, China, Hong Kong, the Middle East and Vietnam. The people, cultures, religions, histories, ideologies and places are vividly distilled in many of the poems in this diverse, profoundly thoughtful, moving and frequently surprising collection.

Peter is also a dedicated and wide-ranging reader (strangely, this cannot be said of all poets) and has delved deeply among major religious and secular thinkers, as well as sampling many works in a much lighter vein. Much of this reading experience (for it is experience) has also been distilled into the fine and often allusive poetry to be found here.

Lest this sound too solemn, too daunting, I hasten to add that there are several poems of an experimental nature, ones that enjoyably and blatantly defy attempts at categorisation. The amazingly imaginative and surreally sustained sequence called Glitterband springs immediately to mind. Reader: take note, beware, and have fun!

Many of these poems are dedicated to friends and family, indicating a broad and intricate series of relationships. Family as a primal concept and as a symbol of transition, growth and loss is the basis of several of the most moving and poignant of Peter’s poems. The title poem, through slow-turning days, is one of the very strongest of these.

Dedicated to his siblings, this poem affectionately and hauntingly takes us back to the cracked brick-and-fibro post-war house Dad/ and Aunty Nancy built. It is, like so many other of these poems, beautifully atmospheric, evoking through acutely remembered sensory details, a palpable sense of the spirit of place: the clang of the shingle on top gate, the rusted 44-gallon mail drum full of leaves/ and redbacks, nursing a lamb whose tongue is caked with frost. Many of these images and phrases throughout the collection are in fact densely packed mini-poems in their own right.

Memory, like family, is another of the most important and vibrant motifs here. Wordsworth’s often quoted remark that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity contains much truth. But the emotion has