Venturing Out: Poems and Portraits by ROGER REES
A Poetic Celebration
ISBN: 978-0-6452995-5-7 208pp - 153 x 233 mm
Venturing Out: Poems & Portraits is a celebration of interior lives, personal relationships and life events. Roger Rees reflects gratefully on life, in poems and literary portraits which are joyful, sometimes tragic, all of them extolling unflinching individual courage, resilience and personal warmth.
Review - Roger Rees’s writing is multilayered and defined by his compassion and celebration of the people and environment he loves. His poems invite an indwelling which is both brightening and soothing. They range from the moving childhood poem Winter Walk at West Humble to his honouring of the Hamar tribal people of Ethiopia, from his sonnets for courageous Russian poets, to the magic of music and his acclaim of people who experience life changing trauma. There’s humour and admiration that embraces life enhancing talent in Dancer at Universal and Elizabeth Campbell Recital. Roger Rees’s language rings with lucidity as in the beguiling historical poem The Westbury Quilt. This is a rich collection with endearing poems and portraits which explore joy and bliss, poised carefully alongside life’s anguish; all of this writing speaks directly of personal experience in a sharing of a full and empathetic life.
Keith MacNider
Review - In this brilliant array of poetry and short prose, Roger Rees takes readers on a journey at once personal and universal, local and global. Venturing Out is an evocation of poignant tales and recollections of landscapes, cultures music, and art. With a keen eye and sensitive soul, Roger celebrates the lives of brave and creative people in words that bring them to life.
Lindy Warrell
About the Author
Roger Rees is Emeritus Professor of Disability Research in the School of Medicine and Health Science at Flinders University.
He has twelve broadcast scripts for the ABC RN Science Show including titles such as: Humour as Medicine, Music and the Mind, Oliver Sacks Virtuoso, Buz Kashi and the Kempsey Bus Crash, Community Focussed Rehabilitation, Sailability and Stroke, Post-Concussion Syndrome –Ebb and Flow and The Battle for the Injured Brain.
His poems and essays have been published in The Australian, The Advertiser, The Age, Link, Arena, New Statesman, Cabir, Speak Out Vols 1- 12, Thin Air, Aust Journal of Psychology, Neuro Rehabilitation, Journal of Orthopsychiatry, The Courier, Argus, Times VH and locally in Milang Community News. Roger Rees has received ARC grants and awards for his writing notably the Flinders University Excellent Achievement Medal for his writing and promotion of equal opportunities. Significant titles among his eight published books are: Parents as Language Therapists, Out of Calamity – Stories of Trauma Survivors, Interrupted Lives – Rehabilitation from Brain Injury, The Art of the Possible, Rewriting the Script, and his novel No Turning Back.
His current work-in-progress is titled Steadfast in a Crumbling World, a non-fiction book about Sydney's The Chris O'Brien Lifehouse.
*The Author Roger Rees will be donating $5 from the sale of each book to Mental Health Research and Development.
