Cirrus@Austlit

If you are here in tins room, it is probably because you have a familiarity with Randolph Stow. Some will have been drawn for other reasons - hopefully a love of poetry-but as Catherine Noske, the editor of Westerly, told me when commissioning me for this lecture, the people who come to the Stow talk tend to know Stow. You are also likely to of the same places as Stow, at least the young Stow, who shares with one of our contributors, John Kinsella, the landscapes of the Midwest. And with the rest of us here, even temporarily, these Perth streets and the river that gives this festival its theme - bilya. (Introduction)