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Glenn shares threads of his life in this searching memoir. It includes glimpses into his doomed relationships, his experiences as a teacher - despite this not being his chosen career, and his experiences in other roles. He has been a manager, a magazine editor, head of a national organisation, and a writer of commentary for management professionals. He has been a hippie living in the hills. He has become the writer of many books. And he has maintained his enjoyment of life. It is a book Glenn calls "a reflection on experience".
This is a book of poems, Glenn Martin's fifth collection. The poems were written at various times of Glenn's life. They are set out in three themes - Young, Living, and Firm Ground. He is old enough for his life to have assumed some shape, be it unconventional or apparently not career-focused. However, he has written over fifteen books that are not poetry books, on themes ranging from ethics and values to family history and reflections on experience. He has been young, embedded in social and economic necessities, and occasionally imbued with certainties. One hopes to eventually stand on firm ground.
What happens when you go back to a place you visited forty-six years ago? Tasmania. Do the ghosts rise up, or has the past all been erased? What if you now knew that some of your ancestors had lived there? Convicts. And another branch of your family settled there and came to prominence? Colonialists. It might start to look like a patchwork instead of a simple story. And then the patches might be stitched together and make a quilt. Thirty-two stories stitched together with meaning. The quilt approach.
"A Modest Quest" describes the author's quest to find out about his family's past. It was intended just to find out the basic facts about his parents' brothers and sisters, and his grandparents. Growing up, he had thought that all his grandparents had died before he was born. This was not the case, but it took some serious research and more than two years to bring the facts to light, and by then the lives of the ancestors had pulled him in. The quest was extending far beyond its initially modest aims. "You don't understand a person until you know something about their parents", and so the quest has to continue. This is probably the first of several books. The book explores the ancestors of Glenn Martin, looking back from the present to about the late 1800s. Most of this book takes place in New South Wales, with some excursions into Victoria and South Australia.
A young man who should have found a corporate ladder somewhere and climbed up it, turns his back instead and goes off into the bush. Years later he comes back to the city that he left. In this book he rakes over the ground: the search for a viable livelihood living close to the earth, the search for an alternative community. He asks himself, was the questing anything more than loss and failure? What do those young-man dreams look like now? And what does business look like? This is personal archaeology, not a work of tidy history. The only records he has to call upon are a stack of papers, folders and exercise books in a box. We have to glean the history from what comes out of the box - poems, short stories and notes on scraps of paper that ignite memories. This is archaeology that brings us face to face with ideals and desire, loss and hard circumstance, and passions that endure.
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