When I first started teaching in Sydney's west a colleague in the English Department gave me a small blank notebook, the kind that has a smart faux-leather cover. I must have told her that I liked to write poetry because I remember it had an inscription to that effect. I filled it fairly quickly with old poems that I had collected on scraps of paper - juvenilia really - lines that I would blush at reading today.

Shortly after I bought a much weightier tome, one that might accommodate a couple of hundred poems. From then on until about mid-nineties, I'm guessing, I wrote all the final drafts poems by hand into this book. They were close enough to the finished product, though some would need reworking at a later date. Writing is always an endless process of editing, is it not? In any event, I hoped that one day I might publish a slim volume of the best of this collection- say 30 out of the 200 odd that I had written. This was not a delusion - I had received encouragement to do so from a number of learned quarters.

Alas, somewhere in between house moves in the late 90's, this volume went missing and has never since been found. I suspect it somehow got put into one of the book recycle boxes that were destined for a charity shop. I was so devastated - this was, after all, my magnum opus - that I could not write another long-form poem until a year or two ago. Twenty years had passed. By that time I was feeling that the haiku form that I was using was just too restrictive. So, for better or worse, I have begun writing again.

These days we have copies of copies. It is hard to lose anything for good. I guess if I had bought my first PC a little earlier, those 200 poems might have found their way onto a floppy disk.