How did you first engage with poetry?
My father was a high school English teacher and I grew up in a house full of books. I read voraciously from a young age, but I mostly read fiction until I was in my mid-teens. I was raised in a Christian household and read the Bible frequently, so the first poetry I would have engaged with would have been the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon and Isaiah. The first poets I remember reading on my own and really falling in love with were John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, John Donne and Seamus Heaney. I had a fantastic high school English teacher, Rob Robson, who gave me permission through his passion and example to immerse myself in reading and writing poetry. He introduced me to Heaney, Donne, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Phillip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Les Murray. I lived in a large country town in Australia where most people only seemed to care about Aussie Rules football, drinking beer and fighting, so reading and writing poetry felt like a radical, subversive, secret pursuit.
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