Cirrus@Austlit

'This slim volume of poems by Australian Peter Eason may be broadly situated in the genre of spiritual writing despite the brevity and gnomic quality of much of the verse, and the fact that some of it is earthy and comical. Eason’s delightfully humorous “Autobiography” characterizes his life path as learning “much about nothing” and arriving at the certainty “of knowing everything” (p. vii), and it and the extract from Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” point toward Rob Johnson’s “Foreword,” which tackles the question of what it means to be a mystic, Eastern or Western, in the contemporary world. Johnson notes that, while Eason is aware of mystics like Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart, he rejects “Christianity’s insistent differentiation of creator and creature, God and the individual soul” (p. xiv). The poetry’s insistent celebration of nature and identification of human life with the cycles of nature on Earth and as part of the wider cosmos testifies to the accuracy of this assessment.' (Introduction)