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y separately published work icon Travelling Among the Stars selected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Travelling Among the Stars
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In Travelling Among the Stars, one of Australia’s best-known poets, Peter Skrzynecki, ranges across the course of his life, gathering recurrent images and memories, places and moments into a whole. The title of the collection is from ‘Epitaph’ the last poem, written in response to a moment of satori on the tarmac at Sydney airport. Skrzynecki’s poetry emerges from the natural world, from a lifetime moving back and forward across New England, the landscape inhabiting him as much as he inhabits it. These poems give the shape of a life looked back on, traces the cycle of seasons, the cycle of the years, the simple lived truths of growing up and growing old. The realization of the roles of parents in one’s life and the awareness of ageing in one’s own body run through the collection, and alongside them an acceptance for the impermanence of things. Family, nature, spirituality, the elements and seasons, and dreams co-mingle, pass by and return – culminating in acceptance and submission to a force beyond the tangible and visible, the light in the darkness before the first bird sings. From one of Australia’s best-known poets, Travelling Among the Stars offers a summation of a life lived devoted to poetry and bears witness to the impermanence at the heart of wonder and the simple daily awe of being human.' (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Newtown, Marrickville - Camperdown area, Sydney Southern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Vagabond Press , 2022 .
      image of person or book cover 5993673955882935987.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 208p.
      Note/s:
      • Published May 2022
      ISBN: 9781925735352
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Works about this Work

From the Porch Helen Koukoutsis , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , November 2022;
— Review of Travelling Among the Stars Peter Skrzynecki , 2022 selected work poetry
Marcelle Freiman : Spirit Level; Peter Skrzynecki: Travelling Among the Stars Martin Duwell , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Spirit Level Marcelle Freiman , 2021 selected work poetry ; Travelling Among the Stars Peter Skrzynecki , 2022 selected work poetry 'It’s a fact well-known that the advances in medical science in the last half-century have enabled those who have access to them to live longer and healthier lives than those of previous generations. This seems all to the good but I wonder whether many have pondered the effect that this has had on creativity, on poetry specifically. Since poets are now likely to survive longer, how does this affect their own sense of the shape of their writing lives? (And for that matter, since critics survive longer too, how does that affect their engagement with “the literature of their times” since the “times” might well be getting towards three-quarters of a century.) I don’t think it’s simply a matter of what has always happened being mathematically extended (or distended). There may well be tangible changes that occur when poets get into their seventies assuming that the inner life continues to grow and change and the creative impetus survives. One of these changes might well relate to memories which, I think it could be argued, alter in quality, significance and insistence as writer approach the deeper recesses of age. Marcelle Freiman’s and Peter Skrzynecki’s recent books come from writers now in their seventies – late seventies in Skrzynecki’s case – and they are both very much books built on memories, exploring the fact that memories are far more complex things than the simple word suggests. When the life of the poet has also been marked early on by the experience of migration with its imposition of a double identity, memories have an extra edge although it could be argued that the memories of everyone who reaches their seventies are memories of a childhood so far in the past that it might just as well be “another country”. A past where, as Brook Emery says in a poem in his selected, “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” could seem nearly as unfamiliar and exotic to a poet of the third decade of the twenty-first century as a foreign country of origin like South Africa.' (Introduction)
Marcelle Freiman : Spirit Level; Peter Skrzynecki: Travelling Among the Stars Martin Duwell , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Spirit Level Marcelle Freiman , 2021 selected work poetry ; Travelling Among the Stars Peter Skrzynecki , 2022 selected work poetry 'It’s a fact well-known that the advances in medical science in the last half-century have enabled those who have access to them to live longer and healthier lives than those of previous generations. This seems all to the good but I wonder whether many have pondered the effect that this has had on creativity, on poetry specifically. Since poets are now likely to survive longer, how does this affect their own sense of the shape of their writing lives? (And for that matter, since critics survive longer too, how does that affect their engagement with “the literature of their times” since the “times” might well be getting towards three-quarters of a century.) I don’t think it’s simply a matter of what has always happened being mathematically extended (or distended). There may well be tangible changes that occur when poets get into their seventies assuming that the inner life continues to grow and change and the creative impetus survives. One of these changes might well relate to memories which, I think it could be argued, alter in quality, significance and insistence as writer approach the deeper recesses of age. Marcelle Freiman’s and Peter Skrzynecki’s recent books come from writers now in their seventies – late seventies in Skrzynecki’s case – and they are both very much books built on memories, exploring the fact that memories are far more complex things than the simple word suggests. When the life of the poet has also been marked early on by the experience of migration with its imposition of a double identity, memories have an extra edge although it could be argued that the memories of everyone who reaches their seventies are memories of a childhood so far in the past that it might just as well be “another country”. A past where, as Brook Emery says in a poem in his selected, “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” could seem nearly as unfamiliar and exotic to a poet of the third decade of the twenty-first century as a foreign country of origin like South Africa.' (Introduction)
From the Porch Helen Koukoutsis , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , November 2022;
— Review of Travelling Among the Stars Peter Skrzynecki , 2022 selected work poetry
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (2)
Last amended 12 Jan 2022 12:25:33
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