A Gathering Sense of Light

By Maggie Slattery

These short poems celebrate the enigmatic, sometimes comical, often disappointing and always exquisite movement between dark and light in every human encounter.

Maggie Slattery received awards from the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Rhonda Jancovich Society for poems in this collection. She grew up in the suburban fringe of 1950s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Mar 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781760413255

Book preview

A Gathering Sense of Light

A Gathering Sense of Light

Maggie Slattery

Contents

Foreword

A Gathering Sense of Light

Acknowledgements

A Gathering Sense of Light

ISBN 978 1 76041 325 5

Copyright © text Maggie Slattery 2017

Cover image © Yann Forget/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA-3.0

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First published 2017 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015 Australia

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

To John, who understands light

Differing voices join to sound sweet music;

so do the different orders on our life

render sweet harmony among these spheres.

Dante, Par. 6 124–26

Foreword

In the living room of my childhood home, three small book-shelves boasted the neat volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica that conceived my love for anatomical drawings, layered transparencies and interleaved tissue paper.

When I was ten years old, an illustrated edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, given to my unsuspecting parents, appeared on the bottom shelf – and I disappeared (with it), behind the couch, into the light between shadows. A promise, born then, returns again from exile in the form of this collection of poems written during the past two years since my sixtieth birthday.

The poems reflect returning patterns of descent and ascent during decades of my life, through memories whose arrows have the sharpest tips. Each attempts to bring its subject into equal light. Some follow strict form;