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POEMS FROM 'PORTS OF CALL'

Binnacle

For Jim - a valediction



MEMOIR FROM 'PORTS OF CALL'

Gaolbird



JOHN HALE looks upon the world with a benign understanding, and he writes about it with love. His work is deftly wrought and nuanced - and, as Ports of Call well attests, he is versatile, crossing the literary modes with an assured ease. This is writing laced with whimsy and flecked with a tough wisdom. Here are stories that intersect in surprising ways, poems that nail ice-pure truths in the hammer of their closing lines, laugh-out-loud literary satires, and memorial essays that take us to the aching soul of the fraught business of living in - and leaving - families. And we travel the world - from Port Melbourne to Brazil to the West Country to New Zealand to Germany to Laos to Wales to New York to Risdon Gaol and to Nowhere Else - we even make fleeting landfall on 'the Isle of Guinness-free'. We breathe the grit of mid-century industrial London and the world's mean and tough waterfronts, and we encounter again the exquisitely different grit that comes with the learning and losing of adolescent love. And we encounter the soul of a wise man, a man charged with a knowing of the ways of the world, and with a great and generous humanity.

                                                                                 Pete Hay