The earliest poems I produced were fierce jabs at the many things that irritated me about the world in which I now lived. Some of them have survived in the section of this volume that I've called Aspirational Lifestyles. Others (
Nacht und Nebel
) were responses to the harsh beauty of the upper Blue Mountains, where my wife and I have lived for the past seventeen years. An increasing number (Dream Country) took their inspiration from the cinema of the unconscious (I sometimes wake from dreams with intriguing images, and a line or two that later turns into a poem). But most of all, I found myself writing about old age (Towards Winter). It's not a popular subject for writers generally, nor is it likely to find a wide audience among younger readers, who are understandably reluctant to look too closely at what is to come.