Cirrus@Austlit

'For the best part of a decade, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, my family and I were included in the informal list of house guests at Abydos, Dr Val Vallis's rainforest retreat at The Knoll, North Tamborine. Dr Vallis (1916-2009), who preferred to be known as Val, a distinguished poet and Reader in English in what was then the University of Queensland's English Department, had been a friend and mentor to me during my undergraduate years. Val's offer to lend me the key to Abydos was a gift that opened the way to a place of profound natural beauty, inspiration and creativity, and the poems in this Tamborine Mountain collection, Green Dance, are the direct result of that magnanimous gesture.' (Foreword introduction)