Feathers in the Well
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About this ebook
I hope you will enjoy “Feathers in the Well”. The title refers to a wisdom once shared with me: that to write poetry and then to publish with the thought of profit would be like dropping a feather down the well – and waiting for the splash.
I hope to prove that warning wrong.
My dream for this slim volume of mine is that many might read it and like it and want to read more. Not necessarily more of me, although that would be satisfying, but more of far better writers than I may be.
My dream is that people will look for the works of the great poets, generally of the past. Poets who wrote and who write with some sense of meter and rhyme and, above all, real meanings easily understood through poems that linger in heart and mind.
A brief glance at my library reveals Keats, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, Edgar Allan Poe, the Brownings and so many more to discover or enjoy again.
In our time the poets are just as likely to be songwriters such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles and especially Leonard Cohen. Our Nick Cave is in there, as are Cole Porter and all those others from Tin Pan Alley a while before who contributed to The Great American Songbook. Then there is the best of Nashville, Tennessee from the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and Mickey Newberry. Australian Bush Poetry carries true verse if you enjoy it.
These are hardly the works you will find on the literary pages or in the journals of the academic elite, where all too often I find simply senseless streams of consciousness, prose that is randomly divided into lines and splattered upon the page for the adulation of the awestruck few. Hear me: the emperor has no clothes!
These poems of mine, I hope, are for those who are sometimes confused by what passes for poetry today. Thus they may never read poetry. And that is a shame!
My poems are intended to appeal to real emotions, to be easily understood and hopefully to linger in heart and mind. They are from my heart. They are not for dreary academic analysis ... they are simply feathers.
Peter Maxwell
Words are like those little polished stones you pocketed as a kid, they speak of the scars you suffered along the way, the loves that strayed and those who stayed. They are the dust on your boots from the long long road. Here’s where my road has led me.I grew up happily as the fourth generation of my family in The Fiji Islands. I was educated, as a boarder from the age of nine, at Kings School and Kings College in Auckland New Zealand before returning to finish my schooldays at The Suva Grammar School. I lived in London for a while, in a flirtation with the stage. In Australia, I met the girl I would marry but returned to Fiji and to Western Samoa where I also lived for a while. Back in Australia I married Pamela, after she had returned to me from South Africa. We have been married now for over half a century. We have three sons and two grandsons and a granddaughter, in all of whom we take great pride.After a long career in advertising as copywriter, creative director, principal of two advertising agencies carrying my name and a stint as lecturer on the creative process at Bond University, I have now retired from all that and live happily with Pamela right here on the beach on the shores of Queensland’s Moreton Bay. An Australian citizen since 1983, there is a milestone facing north-east in front of our home, down by the water. It reads “Fiji. 2727kms.”
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Feathers in the Well - Peter Maxwell
Feathers in the Well
A Selection of Poems by Peter Maxwell
Published by Peter Maxwell at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Peter Maxwell
http://www.petermaxwell.info
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Notice of Rights
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, wholly or in part, or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact permissions@petermaxwell.info.
This book is available in print.
Cover image and portrait photography: Daniel Maxwell
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author: Maxwell, Peter, 1936-
Title: Feathers in the well/Peter Maxwell
ISBN: 9780980706642 (pbk.)
Dewey Number: A821.4
Feathers in the Well
I don’t know who it was, but someone once wisely said that to write poetry
and publish with the thought of profit was like dropping a feather down the well
and waiting for the splash.
Here are a few feathers of mine.
Peter Maxwell
Dedication
For Pamela with love.
For all our sons and their sons and their wonderful wives.
For my sister Susan.
And thank you Mr Hedley wherever you may be.
Contents
Cold marble
The politicians’ game
The Gunamatta whales
Looking back
The party was over
Down at Johnnie Walker’s
Of love and London
Labasa