Wintersong: New and selected verse

By Ian McFarlane

Ian McFarlane considers poetry to be a conversation with the imagination of anyone prepared to listen. His verse is both free and rhythmic, spanning its own inclusive path. Ian is an award-winning writer of fiction, essays and book reviews. Despite the crippling handicap of anxiety and depression, he has used words and ideas in defence of social

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Oct 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761096334

Ian McFarlane

Ian McFarlane has won awards for fiction, non-fiction and book reviewing, and his stories, essays and poems have been widely published. He lives near Bermagui, on the far south coast of NSW, with his wife, Mary.

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Wintersong

WINTERSONG

New and selected verse

IAN MCFARLANE

Ginninderra Press

Wintersong: New and selected verse

ISBN 978 1 76109 633 4

Copyright © text Ian McFarlane 2023

Cover image: Ian McFarlane – Camel Rock Beach, 2015

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.

First published 2023 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

CONTENTS

Introduction

Wintersong

Afterword

Also by Ian McFarlane

For my immediate family: my wife, Mary, our three daughters, Kerry, Anne, and Jeanne-Marie, and our son, Kevin.

With love, kindness and hope for the future.

INTRODUCTION

‘…I have heard that, somewhere in the main

Fresh water springs come up from bitter brine.’

Tennyson

The sea, from which we came, brings food, comfort, calm contemplation, deception, fear and death. Like the sky and the stars, it forms a great mirror in which we see ourselves. It saves us and condemns us.

Tennyson, who was probably bipolar, saw hope arising through the bitterness of life. Like Ian, he suffered from major depression, an illness made worse by the social defensiveness or denial it encounters, and by the fact that it can rarely be seen and understood except by those who have it, or who live beside it.

Ian spent his childhood, excepting a short time in Canterbury, England, where he was born in 1937, on the Isle of Wight not far from the Tennysons’ abode. His very early memories are happy: hairy gooseberries in country lanes, red squirrels in sheltering oaks, peaceful perambulations; even as the Nazis bombed military facilities on the island. When they dropped silver foil to confuse defensive radar, he thought perhaps it must be Christmas coming. Depression, however, gained a foothold early on. Ian began to find that the ocean, and the boats floating on it, eased vague and uncomfortable feelings. Those feelings were aggravated by conflict and confusion over a poem with an old-school English teacher, touchingly described in Ian’s preface to The Shapes of Light.

From a world of The Wind in the Willows, it was not long before those feelings gained terrible focus. In early adolescence, Ian learned about the Nuremberg Trials. The ‘intelligent evil’ of the German Holocaust, and the American and Russian threatened nuclear Armageddon, affected him profoundly, as did the later development of a fascist US Neo-liberalism and its counterweight, religious fundamentalism. A post-war euphoria was not for Ian. He responded with poetry and was good enough at it already to be mentioned on the BBC when he was just fourteen. As he alludes to in his long poem ‘The Apple Tree’, he, like many poets, retained that unconscious security of early childhood, an identification with nature’s reliability: ‘For this is where the world is true’, he writes.

In 1954, his increasing tendency to low mood and introspection was fuelled unintentionally by his father’s decision to migrate the family to Perth, Western Australia, a long way from Ian’s beloved Isle of Wight. However, this was the yet-to-be-appreciated opening to a successful career as award-winning novelist, essayist, polemicist and, from 1991, book reviewer for The Canberra Times.

Ian identifies as an intractable ‘old leftie’. A kind of rebellious social and political empathy runs through his poetry. Certainly, his father, a socialist unionist, was his role model, and politics was never far away. The consequences for many of a raw capitalist economic structure are expressed in one of his finest poems of social justice: ‘The Girl on the Railway Platform’. ‘If only we could pause long enough to see the staggeringly awful waste caused by these threadbare left and right ideological tags,’ he insisted