“No man is an island”: Crossing Thresholds – Journeying with the Recent Poetry of Syd Harrex

Abstract

Syd Harrex's poetry has been widely published both overseas and in Australia, and in retirement he continued to write and to be involved in the mentoring of creative writing. He always considered that his professional activities, which had brought him in contact nationally and internationally with contemporary writers, had significantly nourished his own development as a poet.
    In 2009, as we were working with Syd to gather poems together for Five Seasons, he experienced the sudden diminution of eyesight, the onset of macular degeneration, and this radically changed the way he was now able to compose. This paper explores the connections between Syd Harrex's recent and earlier poetry, the ways in which his creative process changed with the failing of eyesight, and the impetus to write back to his Tasmanian-islandic self through the memories of childhood, as prompted by the melodies and rhythms of everyday life.