David Malouf

Now, there is a poem in your new volume of poetry, Earth Hour, and it's called Retrospect, I think.

It seems to me anyway to be about how people from the distant past can pop up in one's own dreams, I suppose, as you...

I'd love you to read it.

Would you please read it for us?

I'll read it.

It's actually a little event that happens in Jono.

You know, with a friend, I went for a walk right across Paris to Sèvres.

Retrospect.

A day at the end of winter.

Two young men, hooded against the silvery thin rain that lights the forest boughs, are making towards a town that at this distance never gets closer.

One of them, not me, as he turns impatient for the other to catch up, wears even now, when I meet his face in dreams, the look of one already gone, already gone too far into the forest.

as when last night, in sleep, I looked behind me, out of the queue for an old movie, and you were there, hood thrown back, your stack of dirty blonde hair misted with sky-rack, and when my heart leapt to greet you, know your glance, in the old conspiratorial way insisted, don't speak, don't recognise me.

So I did not turn again, but followed down the track to where all those years back you turned and waited.

And we went on together at the bare end of winter, breath from our mouths still clouding the damp air, our footsteps loud on the rain-lit cobbled street down into Safer.

Thank you so much, David Malouf.

How lovely to speak with you, and happy birthday to you once again.

Thank you, Richard.

David Maloof's collection of essays is called A First Place, and his book of poems is called Earth Hour.

I got very used to sort of crawling out of bed and coming and curling up behind an open, half-open door in, you know, the wooden house that we would have lived in in those days, where my parents were playing cards with friends or whatever, and I got used to overhearing what they said.

And I think that was my first training, not to be a writer, but for being a writer.