Wimmera by Australian poet, Romer Rieth

September 12, 2011 terrymcdonagh | 0 comments

I met Homer Rieth in 2001 in Melbourne and we got on really well from our first meeting. I was writer in residence in the city; he was teaching classical studies at the university and had just published his first full poetry collection, The Dining Car Scene. We have remained friends.

In 2009, Homer published Wimmera. He sent me a copy and the moment I opened the ‘parcel’ I knew I was in the presence of something special. If a book of poetry ever changed a poet’s life, this must be the one to change Homer Rieth’s. I had read excerpts of the book-in-progress, but nothing could have prepared me for the final work.

Aside: he forgot to sign the book but, later, remembered his ‘mishap’ and promised to make good when he comes to Europe next year.

Justin Clemens says: it encompasses and re-presents fascinating regional details; in it’s spiritual vision, it is reminiscent of the cosmic speculations of Wordsworth and Whitman. Paul Kane says: Homer Rieth in Wimmera re-invents the epic. There is nothing like it anywhere.

It is an epic set in Australia’s Wimmera Region, 400 kilometres NW of Melbourne, where Homer lives in the small town of Minyup with a pop. of c.600. This is significent because Homer made a conscious decision to move to Wimmera seven or eight years ago. The end result of that move is an epic consisting of 12 books and 358 pages, published by Black Pepper in Melbourne. In comparison, all of our slim volumes seem very slim indeed.

This poetry has to be read in blocks. It tells us the physical, metapfysical and spiritual story of a region. The book titles give us a hint:

1) Jackson Siding, 2)The road to wal, 3) Wide Blue Yonder, 4) Ashens, 5) Sheep Hills, 6) Navarre , 7) Pearl barley, Florida Villas, 9) Marnoo, 10) Mutton Swamp, 11) Tap Roots, 12) Aldebaran and Beyond.