And What a Year it Was. No, the Other One.

I have received at last a gorgeous hardback copy of The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011, containing among many other delights "The Kite" from my collection of that year, The Land of Bad Dreams. "The Kite" was also nominated for the short form Rhysling Award and appears, along with "The Soldier's Return", in the Rhysling anthology for that year. I like it when poems get out and about and I feel especially chuffed that mine is the only poem that Liz and Talie selected. I am furthermore starting to think that maybe gorgeous hardcovers brought out by the "small press" for specialist markets are the way of the future.



For those of you who don't know, "The Kite" has absolutely nothing to do with paper, string and the wind, and a great deal to do with the fact that for a good portion of its history, the Ancient Egyptian civilisation used the same word for a professional mourner and a bird of prey.