This collection explores a wide range of human experience with understanding and insight. A poem like “Photon” injects the world of particle physics with a human sensibility, while a classically referenced poem such as “Penelope At Dinner” casts a contemporary, if satirical eye, on marriage. Sometimes, in poems such as “No One Told Me I Had A Twin”, a wry humour is present.
Rush’s poems explore significant matters, inviting you to experience their events or emotions imaginatively. With clarity and discipline, the poems lend themselves to portability, providing lines, even whole verses, to remember and savour.
Above all, you’ll be reminded that accessibility allied with craft can still surprise and charm.
Bill Rush lives in Melbourne. He wrote his first poem at the age of seven. The author of two previous books of poetry, his work has been published in Australia and overseas. Poems in this collection have appeared in Island, Perihelion, London Poetry Review, Orbis and many other magazines.
Reflecting on the human condition and its habitat, his subject matter is eclectic, ranging from the classical to the contemporary, from the natural world to the deeply personal. Like Thoreau, he sees poetry as ‘healthy speech’, inviting both clarity and response; also as an attempt to show with economy of words that which the Australian poet Joyce Lee once described as ‘the mystery at the centre of things’.
A retired pharmacist with a theology degree, Bill enjoys people, tennis, travel, art and classical music.
ISBN 9781922120397 (PB, 80pp) 140mm x 216mm
"I enjoyed these poems. Many are both wry and profound. Because of their accessibility even readers who normally avoid poetry should find them pleasurable."
- John Hannaford, reader
"William Rush takes events and images that we all can recognize and paints wonderful word pictures around them. This is a book to keep on your bedside table to turn to even for a few moments of random reading when you want to go to sleep with a smile on your face."
- Toni Smith, reader
"I have enjoyed reading William Rush's book'Into the World's Light very much. This is not obscure poetry, though there are layers of meaning that reveal themselves over time. One poem, 'Warning', is only four stanzas, but has a lot in it, about the nature of poetry itself (or some poetry). Speaking of poems, he writes:
'they are delicately shy
avoiding the front pages of newspapers
secreting themselves on low shelves of libraries
dim corners of bookstores'
Nevertheless, the poem concludes
'they aim to grasp our being
by the heart'
There is a variety of poems in this book, from the lightweight to the profound, but many of them do succeed, I would say, in 'grasping us by the heart'."
- Rodney Fielding, reader
Links
Sample
Airport Check
Heraklion. Crete.
Why choose me
from all these others? Perhaps
with five o’clock shadow and
half-closed eyes
my passport life now reads like a story
too good to be true.
Probing my cabin bag it seems
is not enough. Someone waves
a wand over my torso,
back and front, asks me to raise
my arms like wings.
So I comply,
unflappable Icarus, ready
once more to soar
towards the sun.
Morning Becomes Nuclear
good start to the day
sun zipping through glass
perfect September
a cloud of hyped-up silvereyes
shakes the old prunus
petals rain on grass
indoors the smell of toast
Arvo Pärt’s hypnotic Fratres
chant-like on the radio
putting on a good face
the spunky sun
carries on as usual
six million degrees
searing a reactor heart
Penelope after Dinner
Are you sure you didn’t dream this?
Cyclops too dumb to know
what you were up to?
It seems all the witnesses
drowned on the way home.
The guests, thrilled by the horse
trick, now weep for Calypso.
And your tale about the sirens,
they love that one! While I spin,
you embroider.
As for beautiful Circe
being all over you: look in the mirror.
No doubt she gladly pushed you
out to sea. Or, as your version has it,
Odysseus escapes again.
Archaeology
Our lives’ debris in this quarried wound,
layers of waste and need.
Another generation will scratch, sieve,
interpret a compacted present. Kneeling
on sward, they’ll fossick for what’s left:
chicken bone, Coke bottle, rusty fork, maybe
something riggish that will make them blush
if blushing’s still in fashion.
Gulls, here for daily pickings,
swirl over chaos like erratic stars, then wing
south to shore where a darkening strait
washes defiled feet.
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