Folk Tunes

The title, Folk Tunes, arises from my appointment in 2003 as a 'Poet-in-residence' at The National Folk Festival in Canberra. I was struck by the immediacy, the lightness, of appeal to a broad audience in much folk music, both in its 'raw' performance, and when it is taken up in Classical Music, such as in the work of Vaughan Williams, Holst and others. So I began composing poems that tried to combine immediacy in their sense and musicality in their versification. Some of the contents are love poems or 'snapshots' of different kinds of love, some address contemporary politics, or alight upon moments in history, and some are part of an awakened interest in the power and mystery of Christianity. But all, I hope, combine the formal shapeliness of much folksong with a clarity of sense, while not doing disservice to the complexity of the emotion attached to the various subjects I present.