A little over thirty years ago, I sat down and interviewed poet and children’s writer Mary Blackwood in Hobart. To my dismay, the recording failed, necessitating a return visit to re-record our conversation, though Mary kindly says that part of the experience doesn’t figure in her recollections. In her conversation, she spoke of being a writer in Tasmania, also mentioning her grandmother — Agnes M. Morris — a poet too … and a couple of her Agnes’s poems appeared on the website alongside the interview.
In May at a poetry reading in Oatlands, I sat down again with Mary and admired her poetry collection Small Cosmos (Ginnindera Press), her first. ‘I’m a somewhat slow writer,’ she observed, ‘I was probably only averaging a poem or two a year’.
‘Life gets in the way,’ I suggested.
‘Yes!’
Gathering a lifetime’s poems into a book invariably means it has more to offer than interrogations of school and early adult experiences; sorrow and loss ineviteably intrude. But wry humour’s in evidence too in her words — the poem ‘At Your Age’, the lines …
The physiotherapist tells you
there are three things the matter
with your foot
all of which can be expected
At Your Age
I wrote to Mary, sharing my own experience of ‘At Your Age’: the first time a teenager stood to offer me his seat on a bus. The discombobulation, not being sure whether to laugh or cry…. She says she could write a variation of that poem ‘pretty much every week’.
Mary Blackwood’s <em>Small Cosmos</em> will be launched by Karen Knight and Liz McQuilkin on Wednesday 22nd June at 3 p.m. at the Royal Yacht Club, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay.