Poetry by Michael Pugh |
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Lives Entwined
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Nineteen FiftiesPoetryby
Michael Pugh
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Publications
![[Picture]](line3.gif){kind=small}
The Little Mongrel
- free to a good home
Genre: Autobiography
By: Merlene Fawdry
350 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9802845-2-2
RRP: $29.95
Merlene Fawdry spent over
a quarter of a century working with Youth and Family Services, Victoria,
toward de-institutionalisation for children and young people and the
alleviation & prevention of youth homelessness. A published and award
winning writer and poet, and with a Diploma in Professional Writing & Editing, she runs writing
workshops and provides individual mentoring in all aspects of memoir and
life story writing.
The psychology and
sociology of adoption is complex. Many adoptive parents have experienced
the grief of their inability to bear a child; a deep disappointment
leading to uncertainty and loss of self esteem. Through adoption they
restore, to some extent, their social respectability and personal worth,
oblivious to the child’s primal wound of separation. The child who is
placed with adoptive parents soon after birth is denied the experience
of the biological sequence that begins in the womb; the merging of the
physiological with the psychological that forms the post partum bond.
The resultant collision between the needs of the adoptive parent and
adoptee has the capacity to magnify the pain for each and shatter the
illusion irrevocably.
In The Little Mongrel, Merlene writes about her personal experience of
growing up as an adoptee in Tasmania in the 1950s, her sense of
disconnectedness within her adoptive family, and her longing for her
birth mother’s return. This mother/child separation forms the genesis of
the many fears that dominate her life and drives her search for
invisibility. This journey provides a colourful illustration into the
cause and effect of welfare practice, within a historical context that
also has contemporary relevance.
The Hidden Risks
A Story of Concealment and Loss of family name
ISBN: 0-9802845-0-3
Tasmanian family history
Written by Merlene Fawdry & Michael Pugh
When a young woman dies in 1917, her children are separated and all traces of her life are buried with her in an unmarked grave under an assumed name in the pauper's section of the cemetery. One child, Kenneth, is raised by a maternal great aunt who gives him a new identity to shield him from the stigma of being an illegitimate, mixed race child, which effectively obliterates his middle eastern background. Almost ninety years later her grandson, Michael, uncovers the layers of the past to reclaim his grandmother.
Poetry Chap Book Series
Force of Nature
The Fifties Girl
Street Talk
Reflections with a Difference
Discourse with Walls
Poetry by Merlene Fawdry
ISBN: 978-0-9802845-3-9
RR: $9.95AUD
The poetry in Discourse with Walls was written during the writer's period as Writer in Residence at the King's bridge Gorge Cottage, in March 2008, as part of the Launceston City Council Artist in residence Program.
'A magnificent setting for a writer to be inspired. Superb poems.' Colleen Hall
'...your poems are so evocative.' Joan Webb
Sun etches the scene
On dolorite canvas
Nature's timeless show
(c) Merlene Fawdry 2008
In Empty Spaces
Poetry By Merlene Fawdry
ISBN: 978-0-9802845-4-6
RRP: $11.50AUD
In this poetry selection, In Empty
Spaces, Merlene offers her own brand of reflection and social and
personal comment on everything from deceased artists to celebrity
widows; from drug use to dispossession; from estrangement to
reunification.
'Empty Spaces is infinitely sad in its
reminders of history, the human lot, the very fact of empty spaces. Each
piece is a vignette and yet is so much more, taking me, the reader, down
to depths of my soul - of shame, anger,, pity, some squirming at youth's
unthinking, unknowingness but nevertheless a superb book of poetry that
should be read.'
