AustLit

'I suspect Fay would wave her hand and say she doesn’t like all this fuss. If she did say that, I’m not sure it would be all she felt about it.' (Introduction)

'My friendship with Fay was very like so many between women who hold each other in high regard, who would like to know each other at more depth, between whom meeting is delightful, generous, but the meetings themselves are sparse across time for the common reasons we hear in conversations around us every day—no time, distance, responsibilities, work… So I am sorry I have no claim to saying I knew Fay well, though I would have liked to. The context of what I write here is that I visited Fay regularly in the last six months of her life. During a visit after she’d come out of hospital I asked if she would like me to keep in touch and possibly visit regularly and she said ‘Yes’—simply that.'(Introduction)

'It is 1976 or ’77. I am eighteen or nineteen, an undergraduate studying English Literature at the University of Western Australia. In the large, raked theatre a dark-haired woman of middle height and graceful posture lectures about W. B. Yeats and his poetry. She stands and moves with a simultaneous air of shyness and assertive self-possession. There is muted yellow sunshine at the high windows and dust motes climbing. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre.’ Words such as these gather themselves and I am entranced. I have read some of Yeats’ poems, but only superficially. Until now I haven’t understood what his poetry says about Romanticism and the human crisis in the twentieth century. I have had no real appreciation of Yeats’ musical cadences and daring use of language. But, here, his poetry begins to speak eloquently in the theatre’s dry air. Fay Zwicky discusses Yeats and his ideas as if they are close to all of us and of a pressing relevance. Her timbre in reading his work invests it with intensity and a husky immediacy. I realise I have a lot to learn.' (Introduction)

'She knew how to cut a dramatic figure. One of my defining memories of Fay Zwicky is seeing her at the Perth Writers Festival in 1989, sitting alone and wearing large, dark sunglasses. She was like an actor—or perhaps an actor comically playing a spy—trying to be incognito, but simply drawing attention to herself. It is possible, of course, that she was genuinely trying to avoid attention from the festival audience. As she says in Jenny Digby’s A Woman’s Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets (1995), ‘I recently asked another poet how she coped with conferences and writers’ festivals and she said that she could block off. I can’t do that. I actually take on the marks of everybody. That’s why life is so damn difficult. Things impinge very, very acutely as if you have one skin too few’ (99–100).' (Introduction)

'I met Fay Zwicky only once, at the 1996 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies held in Arcata, CA. But this occasion turned out to be memorable for me and, in a different way, for her. I already knew her poetry; ‘Soup and Jelly’, a poem I had read a few years before, stuck in my head for its image of a once-vigorous man now in an old-age home, a once proud man reduced to accepting soup and jelly from ‘a dark-faced woman’, an image of white male privilege empathised with but also slightly rebuked.' (Introduction)