We go to work. Backwards and forwards. Jill Jones is too good a poet though to let Sunday mornings, supermarkets, and vandalised telephone booths be a recipe for boredom. She knows that life is rarely as dull as we would like it to be. We can draw the curtains but we cannot hide.
Normality is a barely balanced equilibrium of tensions.
We yearn for silence and are haunted by the drone of lawn-mowers. Within this apparent normality an aroused self may assert itself or begin to float away in confusion walking down my path, i expect to meet myself hanging around the front door, a refugee on the verandah, pale face and misleading eyes which leads, at best, to some kind of epiphany in the kitchen. Friends and loved ones must be warned against a complacency they think they have earned. S talin believed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. There is little fear of similar reaction in the happy democracy of Tasmania where Peter Hay has thrived to produce his first collection.