My friend Geoff Budden hit a poetry trifecta this month, with three poems published in Other Terrain and Backstory, the literary and history journals put out by Swinburne University.
My favorite is "Remembering Robert" because it packs a whole novel into a few short stanzas, starting with this one:
At home in taverns, not in homes,
you left when your daughter was four years old.
Your own final home was a needle hotel:
Skid Row, Vancouver; 1962.
Worth reading the whole thing. As are the other two, "Remembering Bridget" and "Urn." Many of Geoff's poems are drawn from "what he has come to believe" about his family history. What a wonderful way of describing how we think of our families.
I am so glad I have talented friends like Geoff, Kirsten Rian, and Don Colburn, who nudge me to read more poetry (theirs and others') and get me out of my deep prose rut.
