ABOUT

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

LIFE IN BLACK & WHITE...

English is not my first language. My mother tells me I didn’t speak as a child for years. I would just point to things and my brother would get them for me. Mother would always be telling him to let me use my words.

So, my earliest memories were dreamt in a foreign dialogue and toned in black and white; as this was before colour television; with my awake world – delegating to others through my hands.

...my earliest memories were dreamt in a foreign dialogue and toned in black and white.

POETRY IS MY OUTLET

It is my means of communicating what goes through my mind, what I feel, how I process my experiences, without needing to verbally speak words to people, or to explain why I am who I am.

One of the hardest things in life has been to talk about myself. I’m not sure if this was conditioning, as my parents never spoke about themselves, and trying to elicit information was always met with brick walls.

I understood this as their throwback of escaping Communism – and fearing the knock on the door, which followed family members being taken away.

I learnt at a very early age that it was best not to ‘say’ anything, to anyone, and thus became a private person.

My ballet teacher, Madame Agnes Babicheva (1910-1996), wanted us to acquire some culture, instructing the mothers to provide poetry books for their children … of which mine came home with a 1973 reprint of Hilaire Belloc’s Selected Cautionary Verses:

Child! Do not throw this book about;

Refrain from the unholy pleasure

Of cutting all the pictures out!

Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

– Hilaire Belloc

I still have this copy on a shelf, nicely smooched against Sharon Olds on one side, and Gregory Orr, on the other.

More inspiration came as a teenager in the late 1970s with my English teacher handing out photocopies of Emily Dickinson’s 1890 poem 'Because I Could Not Stop For Death' … of which I was enraptured. My teacher also threw in E.E. Cummings’ 1922 'She Being Brand', for a confusing double effect.

From that moment on, I realised that this was what I wanted to do too. To be emotive, to put words onto paper that represented what I was feeling on the inside, words that needed to escape my head ... To write poetry.

WRITING HAS BECOME MY THERAPY. I THINK I WOULD EXPLODE WITHOUT IT...

My poetry writing stalled when I left High School to study dance, and fell into modelling, working in Australia and internationally for some years. After meeting my first husband, I shifted back to Adelaide and into motherhood by birthing three of my four children during my early twenties. At this point in life, I turned to my writing as a form of cathartic relief.

My formal creative writing education really began in the early 1990s. I developed writing craft skills that aided in my publication, with poems appearing within literary journals, in New York, and throughout Australia, written under Nadine Botten, in my thirties. My publishing credits included: Antipodes (New York), Bawdy per verse & Irreverent anthology, Belly, Centoria, Core, Famous Reporter, Friendly Street Reader #24, Hobo, New England Review, Pendulum, Poetrix, SideWaLK, Social Alternatives, Swyntax, Tamba, The Bunyip, The Colonial Athens anthology, and Ulittara.

Then life pulled the breaks on, as my marriage imploded, and I found myself back at school as an adult trying to re-educate myself, so that I could be financially independent.

Long story short, I completed High School as an adult in 2001, achieved entry into a Medical Radiations Degree, and eventually started a new career as a Radiographer. I continued on with a further Masters of Medical Radiations, and other various qualifications, followed by academic life and becoming a Lecturer teaching into Medical Radiations for the next decade and some, at the University of South Australia.

All while I re-married, miscarried, and at forty, popped out a fourth child.

CAUSTIC COMMENTS

Back, when I wondered concrete-corridors

of green youth

I was stabbed in the butt with a protractor

Who does that? … I asked myself, even now.

… Mean girls – grow to be mean women

… I still tell myself – about that episode

so long ago – it was a lifetime passed.

Back then, my teacher – to my face – acid etched:

“You’ll never amount to anything” …

at fourteen dripping her acrid words

thinking: … Why would Mrs Ursini say that?

… I asked myself, even now. My flesh still scarred

with her pungent laser cuts,

and mordant attitudes …

and all this sulphurous mud before I even knew

what neuro-spicey was … and is. But now, I do.

And once,

he called me: “a silver-tongued snake”

… but what did he mean? I considered

in shame –

only later I understood he was projecting,

that was when I couldn’t do what he demanded,

my belly already with child –

replicating him … and my autism.

Looking back now, I comprehend,

my firstborn carries my spiced-defiance,

and I understand one must wade the quagmire

depths, weighted by tasks that grind us down

to emerge regenerated … Phoenix

shaped by caustic malevolence, soaring, above.

Caustic Comments

THE GREY BETWEEN

I called this book The Grey Between because I like the grey shades of life, the in-between things. As a Radiographer by trade, I work with shadows that radiation leaves behind. Shadows that represent what is, but is not there … reflections, refraction, reduction. Things are never quite what they seem, albeit it’s in the interpretation.

One must bring their own experience to the reading. Such as a Radiologist reports on the resultant X-ray image with their findings; everyone will see a slightly different version of the image they are viewing.

Somethings are dark for me.

Somethings not so.

Somethings are somewhere between.

A DISCOURSE ON LIFE & PAIN

I suppose there’s a lot of my pain on the page, my confusion regarding why people do the things they do, and my disillusionment about people that are supposed to cherish me, and don’t, hidden underneath … or maybe it’s not hidden, I’d just like to think it is?

I discovered recently, in my late fifties that I am dyslexic and autistic, which obviously impacted upon my early years. I don’t know what it’s like to think any differently than I do. and often now wonder how do I, as a neuro-spicey person, navigate within a neurotypical world?

My brain works the way it works. I know now though I’m not the same as everyone else … but there are lots of people out there, just like me too.

The Grey Between is a representation of life’s challenges, drawing the reader into thoughts, reminiscence and self-awareness.

I WANT MY POETRY TO TOUCH PEOPLE...

While my writing has always been for me, for my own catharsis, I aim to enable the reader’s own experiences to interact and colour where they can; visualise connections with my words, to their thoughts and feelings.

I want my poetry to touch people, to inspire people to reclaim their lives, to re-build from hopelessness. To give validation, and recognition, so individuals can begin to repair, knowing they are not alone in their experiences.

I want to provoke thought and discussion. I want the reader to reflect, and act.

… The child stumbles, picks herself off the asphalt, rubs her scuffed knees, and moves on.

WHEN HOPE APPEARS AS THE DARKEST OF GREYS

You abound black gloss poured along dermal pores;

raven as nightfall, without stars to look upon

your summit, as morning air tinctures this death-sleep

dark drab. Unlit words fail you in this ebb

dressed in your black suit of sackcloth and ash.

Your pigment sulks its hue nine to five;

wherein the blackest route dark grey is full of hope,

but escapes you nonetheless as sand slips between

crevices, drawn by gravity to meld with earth.

You page the dictionary of strange animals

with craft harangued with dialogue from your depths

– this nadir of colourless paint drips pure;

you are an instrument of measurement:

an anemograph perceiving the force of wind,

a writer cognizant of life … aching for a zenith.

When Hope Appears As The Darkest of Greys