Cirrus@Austlit

'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)