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A Poet’s Life is a selection of Marjorie Pizer’s poetry that covers forty-two years of writing and the filaments of love, grief and quotidian beauty that are emblems of her work. Drawing together poems from fifteen previous volumes, A Poet’s Life merges this Sydney poet’s characteristic themes and styles, fulfilling its promise to be the ‘definitive collection’. Throughout her career, Pizer writes of hidden worlds where ‘invisible rays’ bind microcosm to macrocosm, and where individuals are gently fused in an interdependent unity. However, she frequently returns to hidden disunities: wars, stolen children, environmental calamities and emotional wounds. Pizer offers up poetry as the keeper of the dead; the keeper of those questions and answers bequeathed to us by our ancestors and our descendants.
- Book 1 Title: A Poet's Life 1963-2005
- Book 1 Biblio: Pinchgut Press, $30 pb, 122 pp, 0975810960
- Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
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The natural cadence, long established as a stylistic feature of Pizer’s verse, becomes an incantation of the exquisiteness of ordinary beauty: the beauty of ‘small beetles’, tea with friends, seascapes, and ‘little nameless jumping things’. Pizer’s lyrics are replete with concrete images: beach rocks, ‘pitted all over with small holes’ and old scissors, ‘Dull, grey, sharp’. Images such as these impart both the personal nature of her vision and the familiarity of visions become our own.
In this, what she called her ‘retrospective’, the sea returns as a symbol of the paradox of eternity and evanescence. Poems such as ‘Tides Flow’ and ‘Winds of Change’ establish the reciprocity between natural elements and an individual’s ‘inner quivering’. The sea is healer and hearer; it swallows grief and mirrors contentment.
This collection is book-ended by the poems ‘Destiny’ and ‘Eternity’. The former captures a younger Pizer’s confidence in a well-ordered universe, whereas the latter signals the development of uncertainty. Still, like her car spider and the spectres that crowd her memory, Pizer’s poems are her constant travelling companions. A Poet’s Life gathers the utterances of one whose life is coming ‘full circle into poetry’.
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