Books by Graeme Hetherington

A former lecturer in Greek, Roman and Ancient Near Eastern history and literature at the University of Tasmania, Graeme Hetherington has spent much of his adult life living at large in Europe and Turkey to be closer to the source of his subject matter. More often than not, his response to his culturally charged surroundings has taken the form of poems rather than scholarly books and articles, as this collection, his sixth, bears out.

The craft in this, Graeme Hetherington's third collection of poems, is like that of the tapestry maker. In short lyrics of sinewy tetrameter and assonantal music, the poet's dark and bright strands of narrative, of thematic concern, are interwoven in a technique that allows the shape of an individual life to disclose itself from the commingling and recurrence of vivid personal and historical recollections. In the individual lyrics there are scenes of chill home life and school barbarities. These are haunting and intimate in their disclosures. In the cumulative effect of the poems a pattern emerges, similar to those that the Icelandic tapestry makers abstracted from their own harsh saga and mythic sources. For Graeme Hetherington takes hinterland Tasmania, with its hellish past of floggings, cannibalism, killings, and weaves into this the pattern of his own experience, his exposure to cruelty, his friendship with James McAuley, his exile in foreign lands, his intimations into Christianity and Christian art. These are lyrics of remarkable self-scrutiny, an older poet's fierce struggle to find pattern in the life given.