Publisher's Synopsis
From a land where the marble grows freely to a land where the didgeridoo, the smoke of the native plants and the stomping of dancing bare feet do all the marking. These poems reflect a personal journey - the marble markers of the people, the events and the places along the path from childhood to adulthood.
From the Preface:
It all began with my grandfather, the white bearded priest, the teacher of my childhood. My memory puts me on his lap watching his fingers walk along the Byzantine notes on a sheet of paper, brown with age but dazzling with the golden sounds that emerged from it.
It all began there, on that lap! This urge to write poems.
"All this music," he told me once, "all these hymns, are love songs to god!" This book, too, is a love song, or a series of them, a chain of them which the muse has wrapped around the people, the places and the things that moved me, that inspired me and that asked me to say something about them...
Since the days on my grandfather's lap, I have grown up and I have moved from that tiny, one-church village, a place redolent with marble and myth to a place, a sunburnt place, with a dazzlingly red heart, utterly stunning in its rugged beauty, bereft, yes of marble and man-made oracular temples but replete with temples built by Nature filled with magic and with spirit. A different land, a different love song which they call "dreamtime" and a much, much older voice.
This is a book that marks the stops of this journey.
