here's the cover spread of my first 'commercially published' book of poetry since Day's Eye, Rubicon Press, Canada in 2008 - it continues my Notebooks, tho they have not been continuously issued - the first instalment was Sidetracks : Notebooks 1976 - 1991, Auckland University Press 1998 (copies still available thru AbeBooks.com), and the next is Melbourne Journal : Notebooks 1998 - 2003, as yet unpublished - the current title Crankhandle comes from a friend's request for poems to publish in a venture that didn't materialise, but I had said to him that I'd be happy to "crank out a few poems " for the purpose - and there's a mechanical relationship (however dubious, however distant, however tenuous - perhaps the real & sole connection is the writer's role as cranky crank dwelling outside the mainstream!) between the crankhandle of my first car, a 1930 Plymouth, which I occasionally had to crank into life, and the handle of the handpress which is a constancy in printing on the Albion - the present book will be published in April, and no doubt it will be launched somewhere, so I'll register that information when I know it - here's a bit from Crankhandle -
how make it new
of old words
time
to give
old paper meaning
& old pens the
slip
that
eyes open
old hands for
the first
& old blood time
old books
& old eyes
