It’s been written in, it’s been inherited from, and the answer has been blowing in it. The wind. As inconstant as dreams, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the wind blows hot and cold, sometimes as thin of substance as the air, sometimes an unleashed “hurricano”.

Stephen McInerney’s latest book of poems, THE WIND OUTSIDE is certainly of thicker substance than air and at times howls through the forest of our feelings. Outside….

Opening poem, Other Minds, mentions the wind in its third stanza –

Restless winds hurrying through the trees, the moon half hid/ And wonder at the lives that you have lived.

The second poem puts wind in the title, The Wind’s Longing, a meditation on the gist of gust, the searching swirl, from whispering breeze that causes rustle and flutter to howling gales destructive as a prowling poltergeist.

By poem three, While Children Died, the title of the book is folded into the body –

For years I have wanted/This/Words empty desk wind outside I want/ To ask forgiveness/For what?/Desires that you have given and not given/ Desires that you permit but do not approve/ Desires that you approve but do not permit/ The lives that you have given and taken away/ The wind outside.

McInerney doesn’t succumb to the doldrums of having to have wind mentioned in every poem however, The poems lift and carry us, breezily or in blast, and strew us to places – Clovelly, Kiato, Kiama – times past, and states of mind, past and present.

But the wind is the spirit hovering/Over the waters,/Absorbed in its own reflection../that the future is a place still/Opening its arms,/Waiting to embrace her/ As she steps over the hill.

THE WIND OUTSIDE is ……..as filled with letters as a scrabble box, and with just as many possibilities.

THE WIND OUTSIDE by Stephen McInerney is published by Hardie Grant.