"My poem Turning Away is an imaginative response to the Australian Riverland as captured in Garry's beautiful and evocative painting. As a first time visitor to Australia I was struck by the richness of detail, the light and reflection and the quiet intensity that underpins it."

Keith McFarlane
Gwynedd - Wales

TURNING AWAY

There is a natural impressionism in the bark of the eucalypt,
a memory of the ancient drift and drying of a continent;
There is the bark splitting, the charring and swelling in fire storm heat
that sweeps, inexorable, uncounted seasons through the desert lands.
The charred, blackened bark, scraps of torn velvet on white antler bone,
are the earth palette, the pointillist basis, of the painter's art,
turning away fire, anticipating technique in a prescience unseen ages old.

Turning away, sky and water, present bark and past fire, merge in the midday heat.
From eye's corner it is not clear where reality ends; reflection begins.
Love and understanding merge in being, separation and pain fade
dissolved in water; all is aloof and silent. There is no longer landscape, artist;
there is no longer viewer, only the painting himself.

The twigs, like fingers, touch, but do not touch,
with their reflections, where worlds merge;
the water, silvered at silent noonday, remains impenetrable;
a liquid softness sharply divides the lover from his beloved.
It is the way things are: their feelings touch but do not touch,
each reflects the unattainable other, stares in that mirror
of intimacy, now marred by rippling tears, and turns away.

Look at the shadows, wave broken, in the forest distance, and see there towers.
Who shall say whether artistry placed the city there in water,
described in paint the concrete swarming of rejected lives?
The mind forever makes imagined sense of random patterns,
entropic dancing; ripple and cerebrum combine in architecture of the brain.
Created things do not see the world, but their own reflections; turn away truth by comforting dreams,
till death shall seize them unawares.