John Foulcher

Dancing with Stephen Hawking has been shortlisted in the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

This collection of poems from magisterial Australian poet John Foulcher celebrates his recent transition from a busy working life in Canberra to the rural tranquility of a new home —a rescued church in a tiny village south of Braidwood.

In the transition his writing takes on new depth, new breadth, new worlds, as from that quiet corner he contemplates an extended, brooding photographic sequence first encountered in London, a brief visit to a Greek island and an even briefer trip to the moon. As always in his work: aging, death, the conundrums of faith. And the transcendent importance of a momentary frenetic boogie with a quantum physicist in a wheelchair:

. . . I thought of the atoms in my eye,

spinning and spinning, and the torrent of light

surging through me, soaking me to the bone

as I stood looking up, with my bloodied knees.