To Fly Again

By Ray Stuart

Ray Stuart was born in Sydney. His poetry has been published widely over south-east Australia, in the Northern Territory and in Friendly Street collections. In 1999, he won the Satura Prize for ‘Duty Call’, reviewed by Ray Liversidge as ‘one long, elegant and lyrical sentence describing an unconditional reconciliatory gesture&r

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: May 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781760415426

Ray Stuart

Born in London and raised in Hertfordshire and Suffolk, Ray was drifting through high school until he discovered punk rock. From then on, he spent his time nurturing a singular lack of musical ability, until realising too late that exam success might have been a better option. Despite his abysmal school results, he went on to forge a career as a nurse, such was the desperation of the NHS in the early 80s. In 2016 he and his wife Alison decided to leave the rat race, so they sold their home and spent the year living in a motorhome. Life on the road re-ignited a desire to write that had never been entirely extinguished despite the best efforts of his teachers. His previous writing experience includes company annual reports, a punk rock fanzine and forging notes from his mother to excuse him from PE. In 2018 he published his first book, Downwardly Mobile spending the best part of 2016 working at festivals and discovering the UK from the vantage point of their motorhome called Mavis. After moving to the Isle of Mull and living in their motorhome Ray published the next instalment of his Still Following Rainbows. It documents the highs and lows of adjusting to life and work on a Scottish island, with snippets of history, vivid descriptions of the landscape and plenty of humour. At the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, as if things bad enough, Ray decided to raid his scrap book for unpublished articles, short stories and pieces cut from his other books and released Even Unicorns Die - a collection of short stories, articles and assorted nonsense, as an economy-priced diversion for everyone stuck at home. These days Ray is officially a hypocrite. He works for someone with an unhealthy portion of the alphabet after his name, is a vegetarian who likes smoked salmon and h radical He occasionally DJ, owns an eclectic assortment of music and enjoys disc golf, writing and plotting to overthrow the government.

Book preview

To Fly Again

To Fly Again

Ray Stuart

Ginninderra Press

To Fly Again

ISBN 978 1 76041 542 6

Copyright © text Ray Stuart 2001

Copyright © author photo Jude Aquilina 2001

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2001

Reprinted 2018

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Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Contents

Foreword

A Glint of Steel

The Tune Changes

To Build a Stealth Bomber

To Fly Again

Acknowledgements

For my daughters – Nicole and Andrée

Foreword

‘Ray Stuart.’

I took hold of the extended hand and returned the firm and friendly grip. In front of me was the warm and smiling face of a man I had not met before. His eyes filled with a genuine love for life. Qualities that are reflected in the poems contained in this book – his first collection.

At that time, we were standing in the front bar of a Gawler pub. It was Sunday afternoon, 25 June 1995, at the first of a series of poetry readings my partner Cathy Young and I had organised for the town.

‘How y’going?’ I replied.

From this simple meeting, an enduring friendship began (No, it is not true! He was never ‘banned for life’ from visiting our home during my own formative years) out of which has grown my respect for him as a person and for his poetry.

The poems in this collection are easy to read, which does not mean that they were easy to write. Considered, neither forced nor contrived, they own a musicality which echoes the poet’s natural feel for the rhythm of words. Filled with often unexpected turns of imagery, they contain a generous sharing of human experience.

This collection is in four sections. The first, ‘A Glint of Steel’, is derived largely from twenty-five years (1956–1981) as a soldier, including a tour of service in South Vietnam (1967–68). From these first pages, the reader is met by a sincere philosophical tone which engages emotions, yet never plunges into sentimentality: ‘There is