The Great Scheme

A trade unionist conceives a grand poem which will encompass his whole life since World War II. Soon he finds he must include his grandfather in 1915, his mother in Hobart in 1935, his father in Egypt with the air force, George Orwell in Spain, a German pilgrim, some French resisters shot in 1944, Soviet sailors drowned in a sub, Cole Porter, Venice, Bob Dylan, Hans Holbein, Anne of Cleves, Trotsky and Tsar Nicholas II. His daughters will be in there, and his wives, and his work. There will be politics, dreams, elections, paintings, mountains, funerals, vineyards, folk music. He cannot evade his implication in dispossession and oppression. These poems try to make some sense of our disquieting times - without certainty, without buttressing from religion or ideology. There’s nothing else like this.