'‘For my first ten years I grew up in Lavender Bay with the smell of salt water, in houses facing the grey curved eye of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was a distant rumble, like thunder, when trains went across.’
'This is a lyrical and honest memoir of a poet’s life in Sydney. From Lavender Bay to Lindfield, Geoff Lehmann tells the story of his life as a poet, tax lawyer, member of the Sydney Push, single father to three small children and finally, a happily married man who returns to poetry writing and translation. His life and work crosses with some of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth century and beyond – Les Murray, Judith Wright, Christopher Brennan, Clive James. He traces the contours of his own life and his family history, and the contours of particular slice of Sydney.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: for Gail
'The poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’, as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother: ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.’' (Introduction)
'The poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’, as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother: ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.’' (Introduction)
