In my recent conversation with poet Jane Frank, she asked me about my poem ‘Promises’ (Sahara Rain, LAP, 2026, p. 49). The setting is Canberra on a winter night, with Blondie on the radio and Gorbachev on the midnight news. Jane noted that ‘Promises’ seems to capture both a personal and a political moment and asked me about how I work with memory in my writing.
Memory is very important to all writers. My collection, Seams of Repair (Calanthe Press 2023), explored memory and loss in various ways and there are several poems in Sahara Rain which resonate with memory and the past, including ‘Promises’. This poem was written as a response to a prompt issued by Australian Poetry Collaboration (The Fulcrum Years, Meuse Press 2025). The prompt asked people to respond to a public moment in history which had shaped them and I chose to write about Gorbachev and his attempt to end the Cold War in the form of a reflection on a lost love. However, although this poem seems personal, it isn’t strictly autobiographical – although it draws on some fragments of my own experience. Instead, the sense of lost romance that echoes through the poem aims to reflect on the ebbing idealism – specifically the belief in nuclear non-proliferation and hope for international peace.
The wonderful thing about writing poetry is that it’s fundamentally metaphorical. The most prosaic, ordinary things can be metaphors for ideas, including political ideas.
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