This concern for, and interest in, writers and their work has been important in many of the tasks he took on throughout his working life. As director of the Australia Council’s Literature Board, as the chief executive of the National Book Council and more recently as the inaugural professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, he has demonstrated a passion for the work of imaginative writers and their shaping of language. Through his energetic support and encouragement of Australian literature over many years, he has made a substantial contribution to our national culture. During this period of intense community activity, his own writing was not neglected. He has produced fifteen collections of poetry, as well as six novels and other prose works.

The City of Empty Rooms is a haunting title. The poems explore themes of travel, childhood, family, refugees and music. Music is another of the poet’s passions; ‘the instinct for Bach’s geometry of sound.’ In the section devoted to poems about music and musicians, there is a fascinating series of poems about Eugene Goossens. This has the potential to be extended or perhaps transformed into a piece for radio with appropriate music.

The poems about childhood and family engaged me first. The utterance of these poems is very direct. Often the anecdote or narrative line on which they are based is simple; only the sonnet-like form, with a turning in the final six lines, gives a deeper resonance. There are poems spun from the everyday: the taste of pawpaws in ‘Backyard Boys 11’; a change in fashion with ‘Chocos’ and the mating of dogs in ‘Animals 1’. Other poems such as ‘Beginnings 11’ and ‘Twist of the Dice’ are more subtle, taut and tough as wire.

Shapcott is skilled in constructing a poem’s final line, thus inviting a second reading as the ambiguity in meaning emerges: ‘We’d scramble back to the safe road. No one spoke’ (‘Beginnings II’); and the final lines in ‘Surf and Sand’: ‘Where I come from / Sand was not desert, it was playground.’

As the poet suggests, this collection is not a final look back on a life, rather an interim report. We can look forward to future work, poetry of reflection, experimenting with form and exhibiting a youthful curiosity about people and place. The collection concludes with the autobiographical poem ‘Three Score Years and Ten’ and these final compelling lines:

The petty tyrants on both sides
Bluster as they always did, and someone will pay
But I have led most of my life in an interregnum.
I am more fearful of my own body’s mechanics
Than I am, any more, of saints or heretics.
Ian Templeman may have bio – if not, ask PR