Head-Waters


Head-Waters is a collection of poems by Australian poet Peter Skrzynecki, published by Lyre Bird Writers in 1972.
The collection contains 45 poems from a variety of sources.
The collection won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1972.

Contents

  • "Weeping Rock"
  • "Wollomombi Falls"
  • "Moonbi Hills"
  • "The Grandmother"
  • "Jeogla"
  • "The Kookaburra"
  • "The Burning Tractor"
  • "Wyatts Creek"
  • "Wallamumbi"
  • "Styx River"
  • "Small School at Kunghur"
  • "Lorikeets "
  • "Mount Warning"
  • "Flying Foxes"
  • "Bushfires at Kunghur"
  • "Winter: Tweed River Valley"
  • "A Last Mile at Uki"
  • "Bell-bird"
  • "The Finches"
  • "Snake Country"
  • "Sundowner"
  • "The Cicada Nymph"
  • "Colo River"
  • "Time Without Season "
  • "A Death in Paddington"
  • "Genesis"
  • "Theorem"
  • "Sylvia Plath"
  • "Migrant Bachelor"
  • "Between One Poem and the Next"
  • "Calvary Hospital"
  • "Randolph Stow"
  • "Somewhere, Between the First Breath and the Last"
  • "Ephpheta"
  • "X-Ray "
  • "The Woman I Never Knew: For Elizabeth Gill"
  • "Sixth of April"
  • "Sometimes, in a Dream or Thought"
  • "Pietà"
  • "Scarborough Cemetery"
  • "Sandy Blight"
  • "First of March"
  • "Long Before the Word is Spoken"
  • "Words Beyond a Speech of Music"

Critical reception

Writing in Hemisphere magazine reviewer R. F. Brissenden noted that with this collection the poet had found his "individual voice" and that the collection offered " a compelling sense of participating in another man's experience of the world."
In The Age R. A. Simpson remarked that there is "a high degree of original writing" in this collection.