... through slow-turning days ... is Peter Burges' first collection of poems. The collection consists of a wide range of poems that touch upon family, himself, as well as the people, cultures, religions, histories, ideologies and places he has experienced throughout his life, and which are, as Shane McCauley puts it in the Foreword, vividly distilled in many of the poems in this diverse, profoundly thoughtful, moving and frequently surprising collection.Shane goes on to write: ... there is a huge range of moods, subjects, emotions and themes in this ambitious and continuously engaging collection. The deeper and darker pieces are effectively counter-balanced by lighter, if often wry and droll, topics and ideas. The sardonic often rubs shoulders with the bucolic. If there is sometimes a form of gallows humour, humour it still very definitely remains.
About the Author: Peter retired in January 2016 and returned to live near South Beach in South Fremantle, Western Australia.Prior to retirement, Peter lived and worked for nearly 30 years in Thailand, China, Hong Kong, the Middle East and Vietnam where as Country Director and then Regional Director, he was responsible for managing the student recruitment and testing businesses, and English language centres of IDP Education, an Australian company.Peter's childhood was spent on the family farm at Broomehill in the South West of West Australia, where he daily rode his bike to his neighbours farm to catch the local bus so he could attend primary school as St Patrick's in the regional centre, Katanning. As a typical farm boy, he spent his evenings, weekends and holidays helping his adoptive father and mother, Bert and Marie, on the farm, along with his brother and sister, Michael and Margaret.Peter boarded the last two years of Primary School and the first year of Secondary School at St Ildephonsus College which was run by the Marist Brothers and located at New Norcia, a monastery town north of Perth, established by Benedictine Monks from Spain in 1846.He then boarded last four years of Secondary School at St Louis, a Jesuit college located in the Perth suburb of Claremont.On completion of Secondary School, Peter worked for a year on the family farm, then, having decided he wished to become a Catholic Priest, entered the Marist Fathers' Seminary in Sydney where he studied philosophy and theology for four years, firstly at the Novitiates in Armidale, north of Sydney, and Hunter's Hill, a suburb of Sydney, and then at the Seminary proper at Toongabbie, another suburb in the western district of Sydney.After deciding in 1974 that he did not have a vocation to the priesthood, Peter returned to Perth where he completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia during which time he spent three months working with First Nations peoples in the North of WA as a member of a Fred Hollows Trachoma programme.On completing his BA, Peter then worked for an insurance company, for IBM, and then for ten years in Change Management with the then Department of Social Security, after which he spent two years as a Buddhist monk in Thailand engaging in pastoral activities and doing intensive meditation.Peter has had a long term goal of becoming a poet but was able to give little time to writing due to a busy work life, as well as a high level of engagement with the cultures and people among whom he lived.Since he retired, Peter has dedicated most of his waking hours to writing poetry, walking, and stroking trees.