WALK THE WILDLY — POETRY REPRINT

A strange walk

It’s strange going back to earlier poems even if it is after only a few years. You read them as if you weren’t the one who wrote them at all. Sometimes I completely forget that I had written a particular poem or batch or that I ever wrote in that style or on that theme.

Walk the Wildy was first published in 2009 by the original Picaro Press owned by poet Rob Riel in Newcastle NSW. It has just been reprinted by Stephen Matthew’s Ginninderra Press which took over the Picaro Press imprint, when Rob was unable to continue. The new edition has a classy white glossy cover with sharp black lettering. The new cover image is a quite monochromatic shot of Grogans Road which I have walked a thousand times over. I can spend a lot of time looking at these almost animated shadows.

A number of the poems are inspired by the place of Binalong — birdlife, drought, hard working people. The collection also takes me back to exhibitions I participated in, books and poems I have read, pondering over a paddock gate, civilians under threat at that time, memories of the place I originated from. I feel quite nostalgic.

The style of the 5 page fragmented title poem is inspired by Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud a delicious book (all one poem) I found in Kathy Kituai’s guest room.

With thanks to Stephen, Rob and Kathy.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

Walk the Wildly with Lizz Murphy in this, her fifth collection of poetry, where winter is a lumbering lantern-jawed season, spring is a baking back, untimely frost a trollop. There are women of precise skirts, men with shipwrecked backs and locals who inspect the brash blue, foreheads strained like fence wire. Reflecting on absence and place, the sea is put aside for special occasions, the river kept for the everyday and language is slow from heat and unfinished endings. She also writes of water ancients, civilian targets and angels caught off guard. Lizz Murphy lives in the village of Binalong in rural NSW.

How to order:

Walk the Wildly (Picaro Press 2009, Picaro Press/Ginninderra 2017, pb, 35 pp, RRP $12). Order from Ginninderra Press here (check out the other Picaro Press titles too) or send me a note.