In 2007, I went to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland to complete The Darwin Poems, the culmination of a five-year project to bring Charles Darwin’s life alive through poetry. This is a verse-portrait of Darwin, a biography of Darwin in poetry, teased out of the smallest threads of his family and work life. The resulting collection is the product of a journey that took me from the Blue Mountains of Australia to Down House in Kent; to Cambridge University and Darwin’s archives, with the delightful but painstaking task of deciphering his handwriting with a magnifying glass, touching the notebooks he carried with him on the Beagle voyage.
In honor of the Bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 2009,
I am going to post a Darwin poem per week from now until
Feb. 2009 from my collection published by The University of Western Australia Press (UWA Press). (http://www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au/)
