Poets achieve their distinctive voices under the influence of many. For me it was the rhythmic and rhyming poems from school and family members before tripping over the freeing lines of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and a host of others. Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" struck a chord that continues to resonate. Single poems have such power. However, poets also become by relentlessly making their own. My early poems only got as far as a folder in a filing cabinet but that changed when I migrated from Canada to Launceston, Tasmania in the mid 1980's. There, Tim Thorne was making poems then submitting them, getting them published and finding time to invent a poetry festival. I got involved with that first Tasmanian Poetry Festival and, after hearing me read some of my mouldy poems, Tim encouraged me to publish a collection, which lead to "Tasmanian Tiger Breaks

Silence". This present, considerably heavier collection, is my fifth book or chapbook and I've now been featured in the literary journals and anthologies of 30 countries, with about 500 poems being published in the past decade. Blame Tim.

Rejections? Who counts droplets of water o a duck's back?