Collected Poems [antikvár]

Introduction IN THE LATE 1960s, TO THE SURPRISE OF CRITICS, JAMES McAuley began to publish a series of poems on his childhood and youth, which appears in these Collected Poems under the title 'Surprises of the Sun'. These were, indeed, unexpected, perhaps even to the poet himself. He had just passed his 50th birthday, and he reflects in the poem 'The Cloak', from the same section, on the 'fifty years not lived, but gone', on the loss of friends and acquaintances, and on 'Death the Magician'. i'' The questions raised in 'The Cloak' and the doubts about ii ' the meaning of things go back to his childhood, as the ! ' autobiographical poems make clear, yet these represent a ;,! new path in his poetic career. He grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, in a house facing the railway line. The ' poems are about his family relationships—'the sad geometry of family love'—and about a child's games, ' fantasies, impressions and observations. The voice is that , ' of the adult recalling, but not reinterpreting, the child's world. In their very honesty and directness they reach out I ' to the kinds of experiences widely shared by those who ' , grew up in surburban Australia. \ Revisiting his childhood seemed to release a new force !' in his work. The grander ambitions and less personal poems ^ ! of his earlier years, which culminated in the epic Captain V Quiros seem, in retrospect, preparation for a later return to his very earliest lyrical impulses. Reflecting on these ij' t; changes when he was preparing his anthology, A Map of Australian Verse (1975), he wrote: It seems that in the last decade I have come full circle back to the kind of poem I began with, but with a