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The habit of drift

by
February 2014, no. 358

What the Afternoon Knows by Ron Pretty

Pitt Street Poetry, $25 pb, 114 pp, 9781922080165

The habit of drift

by
February 2014, no. 358

It is reasonable that poets, by the time they reach their mid-seventies, should be involved in projects which re-evaluate their current lives and poems in the light of early experience and expectations. This most recent book of Ron Pretty’s – and it is by some distance his best – is built around the Swedish proverb, ‘The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected,’ treated not as an opportunity to gloat over the wisdom which age is supposed to bring but instead to puzzle out the weird discrepancies and disjunctions between the two states of ‘what-I-was-then’ and ‘what-I-am-now’.

Martin Duwell reviews 'What the Afternoon Knows' by Ron Pretty

What the Afternoon Knows

by Ron Pretty

Pitt Street Poetry, $25 pb, 114 pp, 9781922080165

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