Tom Shapcott

for Ron and Pam Simpson I Dad’s new car was that Ford Customlinewide as a bed and hissing with energy.We’ll drive carefully, we promisedand took turns to burn up the bitumenright the way to Helidon.It never hissed after that. It sighed.Sometimes guilt takes fifty yearsbefore the blister breaks.The Ford was traded in after only four years.Dad’s silence was the rub. ... (read more)

So many recent books have been about failure of one sort or another that when I read Michael Zifcak’s My Life in Print, with its eminently successful life story, I was at first inclined to scan it for points of criticism. Such is human nature. There are points, of course – the book is really two quite separate texts. The first, and most compelling, is the account of Michael Zifcak as a boy in ... (read more)