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| Cover painting The Five Sisters of Suduireaut by Jane Fordham |
But it's going to be published in September and it sits alongside some wonderful writers on Arc's forthcoming titles list: Michael Hulse, CK Stead, Birhan Keskin, Krystyna Milobedska, Cheran and Ivana Milankova - poets from New Zealand, Poland, Turkey, Serbia and Sri Lanka.
It's a real honour to be part of Arc's list and to be part of Arc, in fact, kept going by the sheer energy of Tony Ward and Angela Jarman and now boosted by the presence of poets Sarah Hymas, who's marketing the books and John Wedgwood Clarke, UK and Ireland editor. John Kinsella, another fine poet from Australia, is international editor and Jean Boase Bier is series editor of the impressive poetry in translation series: Visible Poets.
So in the last couple of weeks I've been looking at page proofs, berating myself for not doing enough networking because I really have very few contacts to pass on to Sarah and becoming anxious about handing it over, finally, letting it go.
The book began several years ago when Jane Fordham asked me for my opinion on the order of a series of her monoprints for an exhibition in France. I was so overwhelmed by them that I asked if I could have copies to write from. For months we swapped lines and eventually shuffled everything until I had the poem, Forest Choir.
And in the meantime, on the subject of letting go, in the time the book's taken to write, one child has left home for university and another finishes college this summer. The book marks big change.