Tuesday Poem: Coastlines - Andrew Taylor

Maybe our life is an affair of coastlines
of touching on contours, of sand shifting
underfoot, of footprints straying
a shore line . . .

                        . . . The only line
that matters in the end is forward.

Andrew Taylor
Landbridge, 1999


Andrew Taylor is a major Australian poet who has never been given quite the international profile he deserves.  He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1986 for his collection Travelling, and the Western Australian Premier's award for poetry in 1995 for Sandstone.  His Collected Poems were published by Salt in 2005.  Although his poems are often described as 'quiet meditations', they are so, so much more.  Landbridge, a collection of contemporary Australian poetry, edited by John Kinsella, is published by Freemantle Press.

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