Reminiscing

Reminiscing
For Chris Mansell

I listen to my old friend,

whose book launch was cancelled

because of The Virus,

reading her poetry online.

Her voice sounds so young,

I think, and remember 

the many times in the past 

when I heard that young voice 

reading from stages – 

and sessions sitting around 

on living room floors, six of us,

in Melbourne or Sydney, or 

Adelaide at the Festival once, 

when that was the only Festival.

All those couples broken up later,

two husbands now dead, and

the third woman disappeared

somewhere in Canberra 

into a life more private ...

and still we are making poems

and putting them in books,

and reading them aloud, just as if

a poet really was a thing to be …

along our long lifetimes.


For the reading referred to, see (and listen) here.

This is truth rather than fact – though there's a lot of fact too. There are minor inaccuracies, in that I've collapsed some details together in poetic licence.

For the record (if any historians are interested, lol):

Chris and I were never actually at the same Adelaide Festival, but others of that group of friends were there together.

 The original three couples were Rosemary and Bill Nissen of Melbourne, Susan Hampton and Andrew McDonald, Chris Mansell and Dane Thwaites, all living in Sydney then – five poets, and a supporter (Bill) so committed that he later served a year as National Secretary of the Poets Union of Australia. I never actually met Dane in person (due to his work schedule if I remember rightly) though he was included, albeit at one remove, in our discussions about poetry, publishing, and Union business. 

I also never met Chris's late husband, though heard a lot about him from the time their relationship began. She points out that she and I actually have three dead husbands between us; but my last husband, Andrew Wade, came into my life a very long time after these events, so didn't seem to belong in this poem.

By 'a life more private' I don't mean to suggest that Susan is not still creating and publishing poetry too. The closest friendships in that early period were between we three women (and Bill, to whom I was then pretty much joined at the hip) and the final lines of the poem can be taken to include her.