THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS POETRY ANTHOLOGY

How fine it was to come home yesterday (after another demanding day of teaching and HSC marking) to my contributor's copy of The Southern Highlands Poetry Anthology which Peter Lach-Newinsky (editor of the Anthology) placed on my doorstep.

Peter was the brains behind the eighty-page volume, which marries Anglo-Saxon and indigenous voices in a sustained hallelujah for everything worth preserving in the Southern Highlands. I thank him wholeheartedly for including six poems of mine, several of which have been published here at The Ultraviolet Range (sometimes in different forms). My poems leap from one thing to the other - you'll come across Don Bradman, Bowral teenagers, glow worms, fly agaric, foxes, native flowers, sooty owls, Smith St Melbourne, Adolf Hitler and the Abu Sayyaf. Peter's editorial suggestions re. my work were deeply considered and most beneficial.

It's an honour to be in a collection that meditates on many Southern Highland things including our notion of home, our shaping by history, what we owe the natural world and what we owe each other. Mark Tredinnick, Jennifer Compton (who just won the Newcastle Poetry Prize), Jennifer Rankin, Grace Perry and Peter himself are amongst the other poets in the Anthology. You can purchase copies of the book from Peter via his website and at those precious few places that still value poetry and place and humanity.

LJ, 7 November 2013.