Matt Simpson
Introduction to the poems
These poems are taken from a book-length sequence to be published by Liverpool University Press under the title Cutting the Clouds Towards. The collection represents the outcome of a three-month poetry-residency in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1995. The poems engage in conversations with a 19th century writer and artist, Louisa Anne Meredith, who left Birmingham for Australia in 1839, having married her cousin Charles. In We Meet at Last the poet responds to the frontispiece photograph of Louisa Anne in a biography of her, shown to him in Melbourne by Prof. John Barnes of La Trobe University. In A Bummer he is listening to Australia's Classic FM in the artist's cottage in Cataract Gorge, Launceston, and thinking of the time Louisa Anne passed through the town. Something You Can't Deny recreates a terrible journey made by her and her family (having come badly down in the world) to Port Sorrell where her husband was obliged to take up the position of Assistant Police Magistrate. A Hasty Rejoinder allows the poet to respond not only to the landscape but to some of the history of Tasmania after visiting the ruins of its Penal Colony at Port Arthur.
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