I was born in Sydney in 1974 and grew up in the working class southern suburbs, the son of Austrian immigrants Johann and Renate (yes, I love a good schnitzel). I have two brothers Christian and Roman.I started writing poetry in my last two years of school, largely due to the influence and encouragement of an exceptional English teacher, Mr. Eric Bertuccio. The first poem of the book was penned on a rainy day in his class and underlines what I really thought of school at the time. The whole first chapter Local Boy is a trip through the dreamy mind of a senior school boy, turning away from the mathematical and calculated curves of learning, into a more free flowing and individual kind of expression. I loved writing words and tried to experiment as much as possible to get a message across in a fluid rhythmical kind of way. This may not be the technically accepted or more popular standard of writing poetry we see in journals and magazines today but it felt right at the time.
Through my twenties my love for writing poems and the simple act of creating stayed with me, and sometimes consumed me. For days I would sit with pen and paper rewriting and changing the script till it looked nothing like the original. I seemed to choose simple themes, such as youth, time, and change; sometimes comical, sometimes with an air of angst and hate that comes out of the teenage years. My bouts of laziness and disheart are on display as well, coming out of school straight into the uncooked stew of economic recession at a time when jobs for young people were genuinely hard to find. The suburban quarter-acre block was the backdrop for my time writing this book, and I pay homage to it in poems like Sunset View... and Images of Childhood. I have always had a love of nature and the outdoors, instilled from my parents, and this is expressed in poems like The trees are my Friends.
And through the eyes of youth comes a plain of learning. At the age of 21 I took out a graphic arts apprenticeship in prepress, before the digital juggernaut really swept over, and I still (barely) had time to learn things the 'old way'. Here I developed an interest in photography and graphic arts which I have tried to develop to compliment my writing, so as to present a more complete package. Please take a look at the gallery to see some of the images that go with the words.
I find poetry in everything....From the look in an old man's face to a mother washing the dishes. From the the simple joy of the open schoolyard to the methodical noise of the dull factory floor. In daily rituals, in the consistent passing of time, in love and in hate, in truth and in lies. Poetry is just a means to acknowledge all of this great and colliding force. It is a way to step out of ourselves and search for true beauty in the mundane. I hope I can accomplish but some of this with my words, accomplish something that bucks the trend of modern world culture, something that is not thrown away after a quick glance or curse and tossed into the great abyss of uncontrolled waste. Poetry is reflection, and perhaps there is not enough of that in our world today.
