Curator’s Note

I wrote these poems across childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, but I do not think of them as the work of some vanished version of myself. Reading them now, the continuity is actually one of the things that strikes me most. The language changes, the confidence changes, the influences become easier to spot and occasionally rather embarrassing, but the concerns underneath them are remarkably familiar.

The same love of the natural world is there, along with the same need for solitude, the same irritation with human vanity and institutional nonsense, and the same unwillingness to pretend that damage becomes less real because people have found a polite way to talk about it. These poems were written before I had much armour, so they often say those things very directly. They want beauty and stillness, but they also want some way of living decently in a world that is plainly not arranged around decency.

That did not arrive later with biology, ecology, teaching, radio, code or field notebooks. If anything, those became different ways of following the same habit of mind. I have always wanted to look closely at things, work out how they connect and resist the temptation to separate them simply because the categories are convenient. A poem, a field observation, a lesson or a piece of code may look like very different activities, but for me they all begin with paying attention properly.

That also means asking whether I have actually seen what is in front of me, or whether I have imposed a tidy story over it because the tidy story is easier to live with.

I was never really writing “nature poetry” in the sense of using nature as scenery. Weather, forests, rivers, birds, mountains and night skies are everywhere in these poems because they were already part of how I understood the world. They were places of refuge, certainly, but also ways of measuring everything else against something larger than the little human systems I was being asked to take seriously.

Junior college in India did not help with that. There was an enormous amount of pressure to perform, much of it directed toward chasing absurdly small differences in marks while the world outside the classroom felt considerably larger and more interesting. Some of the poems written around that time come directly from that tension. When The Butterfly watches a butterfly disappear into the sunset, or A Wish wants to leave a life of strife behind, or The Doom of Man turns its attention to judgement, the natural world is not there as a pretty contrast to human difficulty. It is the thing against which the busyness, ambition and institutional fuss start to look rather small.

The Lord of the Eagles is probably one of the earliest poems in the archive where I can recognise myself almost without qualification, even if the Tolkien influence is very obvious. The eagle is already witness, moral compass and something more than a decorative animal, while the human world occupies only one part of a much larger field.

The same instinct runs through A Rainy Day, Wandering Streams, A Mountain’s Advice, The Song of the Sea, Dawn’s Breeze and Of Enchanted Woods and Singing Streams. They all spend time with weather, water, birds, hills or starlight because those things mattered in themselves. I was not trying to turn them into symbols first and living things second.

Solitude sits beside that quite naturally. I have never understood why people are so quick to treat solitude and loneliness as though they were the same thing. In Bliss, Hidden Paths, Lingering Dreams, My Own Little Corner, Here Lies a Good Man, Musings on Life, The Whisper of the Night and Of Enchanted Woods and Singing Streams, being alone is usually a way of making room to think, notice and simply exist without noise around it.

To a Little Wave is similar. It would be easy to read it as a plea for comfort, but I do not think that is what I was doing. There is more curiosity and delight in it than sadness, and the joy comes from being outside, encountering something larger than myself and wanting to understand it without disappearing into it.

Not every poem needs to carry a wound either. Leaves in the Wind matters to me precisely because it is content to enjoy autumn leaves, while Ripples does something similar with small, ordinary movement. I still like that about them. There is no requirement that clear sight has to end in misery, and the darker poems make more sense when they sit beside poems that are simply pleased that the world can be beautiful.

The darker material was there early too, and it was never entirely private.

There is strife in A Wish, judgement in The Doom of Man, and a longing for a world less damaged by greed, fear and violence in A Year Goes By. Within Life or Without carries a different kind of moral pressure, while Unnamed remains unfinished because private grief and unrequited love were part of that period as well.

I do not see a clean boundary between those things. Personal grief and planetary grief were both part of the same world, so it would be odd if the poems kept them neatly separated.

Climate change and extinction were not remote ideas to me as a child or teenager. I read widely, followed what was happening and understood perfectly well that atmospheric chemistry did not care whether governments had found a rhetorically satisfying way of describing inadequate action. I have never had much patience for the niceties of civilisation when they are being used to make mass harm sound respectable, and some of that impatience is very obvious in these poems.

That does not make them “doomer” writing, but I would not call them optimistic either, at least not in the way that word is often used now. They are trying to make room for love of life while still being honest about destruction. I have never thought realism about humanity was the same thing as pessimism, and I do not think flattering the species helps much.

The anger in the collection grows from that. It is usually not theatrical anger, because that has never interested me very much. It is slower and more persistent, and often sits underneath the praise rather than replacing it. My Own Little Corner, for example, feels weary rather than explosive. The anger is there because the attachment is there. If something matters, damage to it matters too.

That same concern is behind Here Lies a Good Man. I do not read it now as a sermon about a fixed category called Good, because I am much less interested in moral labels than I am in consequences. History is full of people who were very certain about their own goodness. Doing less harm seems a more useful standard.

That is probably the ethical thread I recognise most clearly when I look back through the archive. I do not expect purity, and I do not trust simple binaries very much, but I do think people can pay attention to what they are doing, understand some of the systems they are participating in and try to cause less damage within them. Entropy, finitude and the fact that the world has always been unruly are not reasons to give up on that.

If these poems have anything to say beyond being a record of my own life, I suspect it is somewhere in that attempt to let wonder and grief occupy the same space without asking either of them to pretend the other is not there.

The poems are also tied very closely to particular places.

There is the butterfly leaving a classroom window at sunset, the Tirupati-Katpadi passenger train heading west through a tropical evening, the Tirumala and Chandragiri hills falling into shadow, Brisbane entering the imagination after migration, a full Moon in Scorpio on one particular night, and the landscapes of Tasmania after days on the Overland Track.

Those places matter because something happened there, even when the “something” was simply that I was still long enough to notice where I was.

Where My Heart Lives is the clearest example. I wrote it at Waldheim Cabins as I was about to begin my fourth Overland Track walk and my sixth climb toward the ridge between Cradle Mountain and Barn Bluff. That landscape is not metaphor to me. If I could choose where I lived and where I died, I would choose there.

The poem knows that places change and that the things we love can be damaged while we are still learning how to articulate why they matter, but it also comes from a very uncomplicated attachment. I return to that country because it feels like home, and because memory there is tied to walking, weather, effort and repeated encounter rather than to some abstract idea of wilderness.

Moving to Brisbane widened the field rather than replacing what came before it. I was suddenly surrounded by many more perspectives, landscapes and ways of thinking, but that did not make the earlier places less important. By then, the idea behind वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्, that the world is one family, was already part of how I thought about belonging.

I do not take that to mean that all places become interchangeable or that local attachment stops mattering. If anything, it makes the circle of concern harder to keep conveniently small. Tribe, nation and species are all fairly arbitrary places to stop caring.

That idea turns up elsewhere on this site too, although usually in less literary clothing. The biology, ecology, field notes, systems thinking and the refusal to separate beauty from responsibility all grow from much the same place. I do not think living by example requires an audience, and I certainly do not think it becomes worthwhile only if somebody follows. You do what seems right because the world is worth making the effort for.

I read almost anything I could get my hands on, and the poems make that fairly obvious.

Tolkien is everywhere in the early work, particularly in the scale, the sense of an older world behind the visible one and the tendency to give the non-human world moral presence. Tagore mattered for lyrical seriousness, Sarojini Naidu for colour and rhythm, while Wordsworth and Frost helped make ordinary things feel worth staying with long enough to see what else was there.

But the reading around the poems was much broader than poetry. I was reading adventure, mystery, history, travel, natural history, fantasy, science fiction and moral fable, often all at once, so even fairly simple poems tend to reach outward toward some larger pattern.

Myth enters for the same reason. I have never found it useful to think of myth as escapism by default. Sometimes symbolic language lets you look at something more directly because it removes the familiarity that usually blunts it.

The Moon and the Scorpion is probably the most obvious example because it cheerfully mixes constellations, Greek mythology, Merlin and Arthur into one enormous story. It is overfull, certainly, but I still like the instinct behind it. Likewise, when The Song of the Sea borrows from the apparition of Oromë to Tuor, or when eagle-lords, forests and old powers wander into other poems, they are not really attempts to leave the world behind. They are ways of enlarging it.

I have kept the old title graphics for much the same reason. Teenage me made them with GIF Construction Set, and they are exactly what you would expect from that description: dramatic, sincere, occasionally excessive and entirely unembarrassed about it. Tidying them into something more restrained would make the archive neater, but it would also remove part of the record.

That is really why I have kept these poems at all. I am not interested in presenting them as evidence that I was unusually precocious, nor do I want to turn them into a nostalgia exercise. They are simply an unusually long record of a mind developing in public, with all the influences, repetitions, blind spots and occasional moments where the person I became is already very obvious.

If somebody reads through them and comes away noticing the world a little more carefully, I would be pleased with that. Beauty is worth enjoying, damage is worth naming, and neither requires us to lie about the other.