A Selection from the Catchfire Press book...

'Visions from the Valley:
Poetry of the Hunter Valley, 1960-2000'
Ed. by Donald Moore

Visions from the Valley

[from 'Visions from the Valley: the Nineteen-Sixties']:

Battalions Mass in the Hills

[sunshine, Lake Macquarie]

Battalions mass in the hill.
Sudden displacements of air
buffet the shack. Shrapnel
hammers the iron roof.
Odin's bolt, the Valkyries'
avalanche, splits the sky.
The usurers, the war-lords,
move king, bishop, and pawn.
Götterdämmerung. The world
in ruin falls on our roof,
Hell's magnificent music,
our firelight at its heart.
Fenris, the dog, comes drenched
bristling into the cave,
settles himself down among
rushes and hides on the floor.
Tonight's ten thousand years,
and the wolf growls in his sleep.
Firelight brings bison, deer,
thundering from the walls.

—Roland Robinson

[from 'Visions from the Valley: the Nineteen-Seventies']:

Placings

[the Upper Allyn valley]

Bare walls, plank floors, all welcome grace is here.
Outside the door of this sunhammered shack
a rainforest imperiously waits.
Around about thorntoothed blackberry vines
grin through the window open to their rictus.
One sound, a freighted hornet homing in.
I see through the door stained-glass butterflies
hovering on thistles shavingbrush-shaped;
heifers trimming a wisteria fringe.
Patient sheoaks wait beneficent rain.
A far-off car climbs through my mind dragging
slipstreams, trailing clouds of fawnlight glory.
No signposts here but yet I hope to learn
a local habitation and a name.

—T.H. Naisby

 

[from 'Visions from the Valley: the Nineteen-Eighties']:

Welding

[the BHP, Mayfield]

I live in two places,
Three if you count
The one outside the shop.
Mostly I live in the shop,
Take it wherever I go
So I don't get rusty.
Even walking the baby
Or mowing the wife's lawn
I push yesterday ahead of me,
Making sure it'll be there
When I rise tomorrow, so I
Don't have to worry where I am.
But there's the other place,
Where I flick the darkness down
And my welding shield snaps shut.
A lovely place where I am God.
Let theree be light, I laugh,
And pres the rod onto the steel.
Like a fiery pen the arc
Melts my thoughts into fact,
Nothing matters now, only my hand
Guiding its flaring river of steel.
The weld itself will rust and someday break,
Only the arc will be renewed.

—Cliff Hanna

 

[from Visions from the Valley: the Nineteen-Nineties']

Aftermath of Fire

[Weston]

Black stillness;
stark, brittle quiet.
Agonised earth
crouching
motionless,
shocked!
Black crow,
black silence.
Day will pass.
Gradual breathing
will stir the hot ash,
scattering strands of smoke
to the high cloud
forming about
the distant mountain.
Tomorrow
the shuddering earth
will draw upwards
from her great depth
the tears of moisture
that will cool and heal
the sap of her living.
But today is the pain,
the dreadful pain
of dying creatures.
Today is the burning.
Today is the heat.
Today is the endless, pitiless sun.

—Alice Sinclair

 

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