A Poet's Life

By Marjorie Pizer

1963 - 2005
Poems
The definitive collection of Marjorie Pizer's poetry

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Pinchgut Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987119100

Book preview

A Poet’s Life

A Poet’s Life

by

Marjorie Pizer

Foreword by Drusilla Modjeska

By the same author

Creeve Roe, Poems of Victor Daley; co-editor with Muir Holburn, 1947

Freedom on the Wallaby, Poems of the Australian People; editor, 1953

The Men Who Made Australia, Stories and Poems by Henry Lawson; editor, 1957

Come Listen, Poetry for Schools; co-editor with Joan Reed, 1966

Thou and I, Poems, 1967

To Life, Poems, 1969

Tides Flow, Poems, 1972

Seasons of Love, Poems, 1975

Full Summer, Poems, 1977

Gifts and Remembrances, Poems, 1979

To You the Living, Poems of Bereavement and Loss, 1981, 1991, 1992

The Sixtieth Spring, Poems, 1982

Below the Surface, Reflections on Life and Living;

co-author with Anne Spencer Parry, 1982, 1990, 1994

Selected Poems, 1963-1983, 1984

Poems of Lesbia Harford; co-editor with Drusilla Modjeska, 1985

Equinox, Poems, 1987

Fire in the Heart, Poems, 1990

Journeys, Poems, 1992

Winds of Change, Poems, 1995

Await the Spring, Poems, 1998

A Fortunate Star, Poems, 2001

This is the definitive collection of Marjorie Pizer’s poetry, gathered from her fifteen published works. For 35 years she was a psychotherapist in Sydney. She now lives in Canberra.

Acknowledgements

Some poems in this collection have previously appeared in the Bulletin, Sydney Morning Herald, Quadrant, Poet, Australian Women's Weekly, Cleo, Woman's Day, Education, Habitat and in a number of anthologies of poetry published in the United Kingdom.

Cover: Oil painting by Judy Lane.

First published in Australia in 2006

Copyright ©Marjorie Pizer, 2006

This second edition first published in 2010

Version 1.0

Copyright ©Marjorie Pizer, 2010

Published by Pinchgut Press

11 Bates St, Canberra, Australia, 2602

http://www.pinchgut-press.com.au

Paper editions printed by Lulu 

http://www.lulu.com

ISBN 978-0-9808056-0-4 Paper Edition

This book is copyright.  Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.  Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Foreword

Four decades of living are distilled in the poems gathered here in A Poet's Life. Beginning in 1963, three years after the sudden death of her husband and a grief that ‘shattered’ Marjorie Pizer ‘into becoming a poet’, this book celebrates the journey that has brought her to the present, where as great-grandmother and poet, she can write of forgetting a once lacerating anniversary. Anniversaries run through the collection, entwining grief and celebration. Ancestors and poets, friends and dogs are conjured by her remembering; in our shared, public life of anniversaries, it's the forgetting that we’re prompted to remember.

Those familiar with Marjorie Pizer’s poetry will recognise characters and loved landscapes, the books that ‘overflow’ her bed and her house, the tiny spider that travels in her car, and the poets who form the ground of her poetry and her life. Early in the book, she writes of herself as ‘a satisfied snail/Making a little silver trail of poems’; by its end, poetry is offered less as a trail, coming along behind, than as a gathering up, an interweaving of experience and expression.

‘I, in my car, am a little speck

In the face of this immensity and mystery,

Making tiny marks in ephemeral notebooks

And calling them poems.'

Hers is poetry that Judith Wright read for the ‘gift she has so quietly brought us’, May Sarton for ‘singular simplicity and depth’ and Anne Deveson for ‘the kind of joys' that 'can be seen more clearly as you get older’. Manning Clark called them ‘hymns of praise to life’, and to Bruce Beaver they offer ‘a very quiet sense of wonder’.

A Poet’s Life is indeed a hymn to life, and a life lived in poetry.

Drusilla Modjeska

In memory of Muir Holburn, 1920 – 1960.

Friend, lover, husband, fellow-poet and    

father of our children, Kim and Jo Holburn.

From Selected Poems 1963 — 1983

Destiny

Silver trail

Going home

Love

Lying in my bed

When I look at my bed

Wiseman’s Ferry

Young Man Dead

Garden of Remembrance

Funeral

The Everlasting Sea

Remembrance

Day's end

Sound of rain

On revisiting my childhood home

My grandfather

Memories of my father

For my mother

A Father Dead

Tears of all the World

Into the depths

My healing

Strength

Caterpillar

Gifts

Web of the world

Paradox

Vocations

Dreams of the unborn

A memory

Do not give me a guru

Myths of the past

Lament for the lost beauties of the English language

Australia

European Civilisation*

Anguish of the World

Modern Calvary

Passover child*

The beauty of things

Monologue for Henry Lawson*

For Po Chü I*

Leaves and poems

Beach rock

An interim

Lying flat on the grass

Tides flow

Love will never go out of this world

My light

From Equinox, 1987

Childhood Dreaming

Auntie Dollie

Lest We Forget

My House

My Son

Evanescence

Will I Be Reconciled?

Dying of Cancer

Empty House

Out of the Crashing Thunder

For Kiah

The Great Symphony

Wild Winds of the Universe

From Fire in the Heart, 1990

Descendent of Migrants

My Mother

Who