AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 1
Peter Skzynecki
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Peter Skrzynecki courtesy of The Northern District Times, 1996.
CH: What is your most memorable childhood experience?
PS: Being born. It might sound loony or precious but I do remember parts of the experience. (Colours were black and pink - pierced with white/like light). My mother was alone with me. It was in Germany and it was a very traumatic time for her. The war was still on though it was winding down quickly. The Nazis were in retreat everywhere. Germany was running out of money, etc. She and my biological father had separated. It was a very intense experience. I didn't want to be born. I fought against it. In 1969 I was being treated for burst ulcers and mentioned it to the doctor who'd asked me to tell him the story of my life. He listened and said that's okay, nothing wrong with that ... People often remember the experience under deep hypnosis ... I felt at the time a great big secret had been let out but I felt better ...
CH: What are you working on at the moment?
PS: A new collection of poems, something in the prose field and waiting to hear from my literary agent about my childhood memoirs that I've spent the last two years writing and hoping to publish this year. I'm working on a new collection of poems - just writing as I always do and on something in the prose field that I'd rather not talk about. I've spent the last two years writing my childhood memoirs and this manuscript is with my literary agent at the moment. It's an attempt to come to terms with something that happened - trauma? - in recent years but covering the first 12 years in Australia as well. It doesn't proceed chronologically but is written in a style similar to stream-of-consciousness. New for me.
CH: What are you afraid of?
PS: Not afraid of much, really. I've had three near-death experiences and there's not much left to speculate after those...They are associated with water, fire and blood. A Zen teacher told me some years ago there'll be one more. (I've calculated they happen approx. every 22 years. (What I witnessed in the HIV Ward in RPA when my wife got sick while waiting for her second bone-marrow transplant to engraft - the first transplant failed -has made me able to detach quite easily from fear that suffering engenders ... You don't become indifferent but you experience the experience of accepting things for what they are. Once the penny drops it's all quite simple ... But, even so, there' s a paradox in that ...)
CH: What would you do if you won a million dollars?
PS: The million dollar question. Honestly, I really don't know. I suppose I'd give some to the Leukaemia Foundation and take an extended trip to Europe. The older I get the more I really miss Europe in my blood. I was in Italy last year and could have easily dropped out of sight. Not returned. The thought crossed my mind many times ... I have three children, of course I'd give them some ...
CH: What is your favourite animal and why?
PS: Dog is my favourite animal. I've always had one ... They don't ask for much. Are loyal, loving, trusting, love you in return. Will sit by you and not bother you when you're trying to write ...
CH: Do you believe that human beings have a purpose?
PS: Purpose of life is to live but that's a hard one ... What else is there ? I've read Camus and have thought about the suicide question. Trouble with that one is you've got to be alive first to experience the alternative. So we stumble and bumble on, faced with the same questions that Lear and Hamlet and Ahab faced, asking the same, delving into ourselves and our natures to discover the answers ...
CH: Name a piece of visual art that has truly touched you?
PS: Most memorable piece of visual art that has touched me is Elioth Gruner's "Spring Frost." I've always loved it. ... The farmer in the scene reminds me my father, even the walk, the swing of arms.The light and animals in the scene bring back images of the time I taught on the New England plateau.It's probably the peasant in me (Both my parents- and my adopting father - were farm people) ... I could sit for hours and look at that scene and not move a muscle...I recently saw it in the NSW Art Gallaery - just as I walked in - there it was - it literally stopped me in my tracks and took away my breath ...
CH: Name what is most important to you?
PS: Love. That's what's most important. Love's the most important things in the world. The Beatles were right ... It overcomes ego, vanity and all those other minuses that get in the way of us seeing clearly ... It'd be too obvious to say love has to be "unconditional" and selfless but it's true. That is the message of the New Testament. Christ's last words to his apostles on the night of the Last Supper were, Go and love one another as I have loved you ...
| |
New England Farmer
Often he would catch me
by surprise - the way he'd appear
in the distance and casually
walk across the paddocks,
his dog beside him or at his heels -
after I'd arrive at work,
and say, "G'day, how's it going?"
His property bordered
the school where I taught
on the northern Tablelands, the high country
that lay between granite boulders
and clouds that treetops tore open,
that rolled in from the Pacific coast
and brought the rain,
the drizzles and mists - and when they did
we'd go indoors, to the fire,
talk about the city and the bush
before the hours of classes started.
Or, standing outside,
the sun warming our faces,
I'd watch him peer into the fenced-off
distances, drawing on a cigarette
that was never absent from his lips -
as though he could see through
the forest and hills, out to where
Herefords grazed and a brown dam
mirrored the moving sky,
as though he was listening to a song
beyond those that magpies
and parrots released
from the green windbreak of pines
that grew in the schoolyard -
or, he'd point out the weakest lambs
that straggled behind their mothers,
how crows watched patiently
from barbed-wire fences.
It was his silences, though,
that fascinated me the most -
the long, almost-shy pauses
between breathing and actual sound.
It was then that I'd hear
the forest and paddocks
speaking in a wind-carried tongue
I'd never heard before or since -
and slowly, slowly, after that initial greeting,
I began to learn of a country
that existed beyond the city and the bush.
Goshawk Circling
for Tom McKibbin
To the right of Lake Macquarie's fringe
of paperbarks and she-oaks
it comes down in widening circles,
glides without a wing beat moving
and rises on gusts of wind we can't feel
from where we sit and talk.
It's not the effort of descent
and climb that intrigues me, I say.
It's the mystery of how it survives by seeing
from so high up - then striking at what's
invisible to the human eye, the prey
in the forest after last night's rain.
Almost deliberately, as if hearing us,
a slate-grey body, its feathers
imprinted with a fantail pattern,
hovers and stalls above our questions.
Noisy miners chatter in distraction
among rows of grevilleas and murrayas.
Trying to imagine sophisticated bird-radar,
primitive telescopic vision or some kind
of inborn brain-mechanism
that propels the goshawk to drop
from the sky like it does,
we continue watching until it sweeps
from sight and human speculation.
The Sunday morning's as perfect as it can be
for two men talking about a friendship
that goes back across a lake of forty years -
and the goshawk in the forest
that's dropped to make its kill.
To Kenneth Slessor
After writing all those poems
about Sydney Harbour and the sea, exotic places
and travellers with foreign names,
your mortal remains ended up
in Rookwood Cemetery, under a pink rosebush,
beside Noela, your first wife,
just as you requested in your will -
in the Sunken Garden, surrounded
by sandstone memorial walls.
The only water's in the central pond
where golden carp lie indolently
under broad waterlily pads.
Blackbirds and Willy-wagtails
contend for airspace with their songs
in pine trees and oleanders.
Time, too, seems caught between
the desire to escape or come in from the heat -
not that there's much room to move
in that shaded, narrow corner,
in what's left of the late afternoon summer hours
as a cortege arrives at the crematorium
and workmen are cementing another row
of niche walls, all within earshot of each other.
You gave me one of my first reviews
more than thirty years ago now -
generous praise of a cautious standard
and I've often wondered how much
I've managed to live up to it.
I never took your advice, though,
and anglicised my name
as your family did theirs
when Schloesser became Slessor
and so much easier to pronounce and spell.
What should I have changed Skrzynecki to -
Smith ? Sullivan ? Short ? Sheehan ?
I always like the letter S.
Would it have made "things easier"
as you said but never explained.
Somebody else came up to speak to you
And the conversation was never finished.
The air's heavy with the scent
of spring's last flowers and summer's
first intoxicating crops -
roses, gardenias, port-wine magnolias
arranged around small pebbled pathways
that are currently undergoing "reconstruction".
A jacaranda leans over the wall
and drops its blue-bell shapes
among pine bark, leaves and dry petals.
Seats and terracotta figurines have been added
since your ashes were interred.
One, of a peasant girl with an empty basket,
nearest to you - head turned away,
with a fierce, indignant look - might have
pleased you the most, I think.
Over the eastern road is the Islamic Ground,
closer by is the Chinese Section.
One would think that the world
today has chosen to bury its dead
behind the steel gates of Rookwood Cemetery.
I wonder if you had any idea
that the Sydney you loved so much
was going to become a global village ?
Time's up and I have to go
but I know it won't be long before I'm back,
that I'll drive past like I've done
so many many times in the last thirty years -
only now my thoughts will be with you
behind the sandstone wall and garden of roses.
My parents are buried in the Polish Section
and one day I'll be there, too.
It's not far away, less than ten minutes
at a leisurely pace, out of the heat,
under the eucalypts and wattle trees -
quite close, really. No water to cross,
no ferries, yachts, trams or buses
and time is something that won't exist.
Maybe our spirits can meet along the road
and have that conversation we never finished.
Flame-Tree and Jacaranda
The sight of a flame-tree and jacaranda
growing side by side
always stopped him in his stride,
evoking memories or releasing an image
that helped to span the distance
between the North Coast
where he was working and home -
whether it was by the side of a road,
riverbank or growing on a hillside:
the way the two colours stood out
in a blaze of tropical light,
dark as a bloodbird, brighter
than shallow water.
And yet, kinship ties vanished;
memories and images of the past
would fade - so did the fear
that death might be waiting
at the next hairpin bend
as he drove home in the dark.
Nothing but nothing human remained
to bind him to the earth for as long
as he looked at the two trees.
He felt as if he was dissolving painlessly
in fire and water, both at once -
and the two trees were reflections
of what his body would become.
Acknowledgments: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). |
About the Poet Peter Skzynecki
|
Peter Skrzynecki has published fourteen books of poetry and prose. Immigrant Chronicle was set on the New South Wales HSC syllabus in 1992 and, to date, has sold 20,000 copies. His literary prizes include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the Henry Lawson Short Story Award, and the Captain Cook Bi-Centenary Award, and he has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award three times. In 1989 he received the Order of Cultural Merit from the Polish government. His work has appeared in more than eighty anthologies in Australia and overseas and has been translated into German, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Polish, Vietnamese, Polish and Ukrainian. He teaches at the University of Western Sydney. |
[Above] Photo of Peter Skrzynecki courtesy of The Northern District Times, 1996.
I Next I
Back I
Exit I
Thylazine No.3 (March, 2001) |
