"...It was some time since the author had been seen in his home town (Sydney). Standing, he said to me - though we had been drinking, taking various pills - did I know Apollinaire's lines - about tossing off your life as tho it were a drink? 'Some Days', he said, strayed between the poles of Robbe Grillet's
In The Labyrinth
and 'Tambourine Life'. Endless lyric,
bildungsroman
, parody, abstract poem? 'Footprints' he said he had thought of as something. He had forgotten, but must once have had an idea of it. It was dawn. We inhaled. He had liked, he said, the paintings of Patrick Caulfield - but I knew he was talking again about the big poem. He was my friend. The Elders and Goldsborough Mort buildings began to catch the early light. We gazed down together over the parapet, at the traffic just beginning, both pleased at its miniature scale." - Julie Lawton