Author's note: A Note on this Selection This new selection is by way of redefining the verse I started to write for national publication when demobilised in September 1945. I urgently wanted to put down in words the country I came from, the Darling Downs, to which I might not have returned. I regard 1945 as the real mark of my beginning; now I have written it in. ...
Because I have not, therefore, put together a book of poems for thirteen years, this book's New Poems, entitled Honey Licked from a Thorn, have been chosen to represent what I have written since the Eighties when I kept on speaking as the issue of life continued to engage me, as it engages us all. Because of the years, it claimed even more urgent attention; and I feel compelled to note that here is a book by a survivor who served among multitudes of young men and women whose tomb is the South-West Pacific.
Providence gave me what it did not give them - a lifetime . I hope the book shows I made use of what was given. - D. R.
