Cirrus@Austlit

Preface by Professor David Myers Central Queensland University 19 June 1996 (xi-xiii)

Afterword: ... My purpose was to collect not only the new poems I had written since the release of my Penguin Book, New and Selected Poems 1945-1993 in January 1994. It was also to reassess and restore, and preserve in this book, a number of the poems of my lifetime that had been 'lost' as individual poems, mislaid in anthologies or gone with books out of print, and as individual volumes included as addenda to other collections. ... In my Penguin book two poems in particular, 'Letter to Jean Chapalain' and 'Scherezade', were cut clean in half (mea culpa), and David Malouf for one was sorry about the truncation; the gist of opinion was that they were both key global poems and now more relevant to the times than when written. Both have been restored in full. ... D. R. (79).