I first read this poem while living in Edinburgh a number of years after I first met John Forbes when I was a student at the University of Sydney in the mid 80s and he was a friend of my flatmate. He used to come round to the house in Bailey Street in Newtown (he was living just around the corner) and I admit to being slightly star-struck even then.

I’d discovered the Australian ‘Generation of 68’ poets fairly recently through the seminal collection The New Australian Poetry edited by his friend and poet John Tranter and was in awe of having the chance to actually speak to and socialise with one of them. This was an important movement in the development of a body postmodern Australian writing and moved away from the more traditional, pastoral ‘I love a sunburnt country’ type of work that had been rote-learned at Australian primary schools for a generation or two. It showed a young poet that there was a language of poetics that spoke more directly to another, newer generation.

Forbes’s work isn’t always accessible, it’s deeply intellectual and layered, as are all the best. He makes you work. I find Love Poem reveals more about Forbes than his other work.

. . . ‘as I curl up with the war
in lieu of you, whose letter

lets me know my poems show
how unhappy I can be.’

It appears to be about modern war but moves from the universal (sad to realise that Iraq is still the centre of conflict some 20 years after this poem was written) to the deeply personal and revelatory – the conflict intrinsic to love and its etiquette, and unrequitedness. Love Poem really speaks of John – who died suddenly in 1998 the age of 47 – and will reveal always, to me, something of his own inner conflict and loneliness. This one is carried in the heart and in the head.

Helen Loughlin was born in Edinburgh and grew up in Australia where she studied literature at the University of Sydney and where her work has been published in a number of literary magazines. She has been poetry editor of Antithesis, Hermes, Tangent and Phoenix Review. She currently lives in Edinburgh and is producer of the Bridge Readings series of literary events. She still writes, sporadically.