RonPrice
New Member
Perhaps I will get around to reading Manning Clark's History of Australia: Volumes 1-6 in the latter years of my latter years. It is still too much for me, too detailed an account for someone like me who likes a general picture and has so much that he wants to read from an immensely burgeoning world of print. But I have found some of the things Clark says provide useful ways of putting my task as a poet in perspective. I try to say, in my poetry, 'what the heart doth say' about one of the great passions of my life--the complex interrelationships between my society, my religion and my own experience. My poetry attempts to describe the experience of one man pioneering a new Faith across two continents over four epochs of the first century of the Formative Age. Here, in what has become a massive poetic opus, is a putting into words of what one man saw when he opened a window on his experience, richly coloured as it was by his religion and the story of his society. I have, like Clark and Thomas Hardy before me, watched "that pattern among general things" which my idiosyncrasy moves me to observe.-Ron Price with thanks to Manning Clark, A History of Australia: Vol. 3 and 6, Preface, 1973 and 1987.
We pay a terrible price
for our fatal flaws---
as you put it when
you were finishing up
your great work.
The one precious gift
we need is to read
the direction of the
river of life and
I have poured much
into that reading.
I have poured my life
into this 'holy crusade.'
It has fortified my days,
but left me worn at the edges
as the light was finally
installed on the hill
in the Vineyard of the Lord.
It wasn't, as Clark concluded,
that no one knew the direction
of the river or had anything to say.1
Too many people thought they knew
and even more had something to say.
If I did not have the aid
of those Men of Baha,
I would drown in that
blood-dimmed tide
of passionate intensity2
and endless, absolutely
endless, opinions.
1 Clark, Vol.6, op.cit., p.500: written on or about May 13th 1987.
2 W.B. Yeats: in his famous prophetic poem.
Ron Price
22 February 2002
We pay a terrible price
for our fatal flaws---
as you put it when
you were finishing up
your great work.
The one precious gift
we need is to read
the direction of the
river of life and
I have poured much
into that reading.
I have poured my life
into this 'holy crusade.'
It has fortified my days,
but left me worn at the edges
as the light was finally
installed on the hill
in the Vineyard of the Lord.
It wasn't, as Clark concluded,
that no one knew the direction
of the river or had anything to say.1
Too many people thought they knew
and even more had something to say.
If I did not have the aid
of those Men of Baha,
I would drown in that
blood-dimmed tide
of passionate intensity2
and endless, absolutely
endless, opinions.
1 Clark, Vol.6, op.cit., p.500: written on or about May 13th 1987.
2 W.B. Yeats: in his famous prophetic poem.
Ron Price
22 February 2002