Author and poet Peter Kocan was born in Newscastle, Australia, in 1947. Kocan left school at fourteen to work in country New South Wales as a laborer and station-hand, before returning to Sydney, where he gained work as a factory-hand in a dye factory. In 1966, Kocan’s failed attempt to assassinate federal opposition leader Arthur Calwell in Sydney saw him sentenced to life imprisonment. Later that same year Kocan was transferred from Sydney’s infamous Long Bay jail to Morisset hospital for the Criminally Insane. Kocan’s first books of poetry, Ceremonies for the lost (1974) and The Other Side of the Fence (1975), were published while he was at Morisset.
He was released in 1976 and began rebuilding his life by writing about his experiences. Two autobiographical novellas, The Treatment and The Cure, told of his harrowing life in the asylum. The Cure won the 1983 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Kocan lived for many years on the Central Coast of New South Wales, teaching, acting, and writing drama, poetry, and fiction. He gained public recognition for his work and received regular support from the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council. He graduated from the University of Newcastle in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours), and recently obtained a Masters degree.
In 2003, Kocan moved to Brisbane, Queensland.
Fresh Fields, a fictionalised account of Kocan’s difficult youth, was named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement.
Click here to read Andrew’s reviews of two of Peter Kocan’s poetry collections.
Literary works by Peter Kocan
Poetry
1. The Other Side of the Fence
2. Armistice
3. Freedom to Breathe
4. Standing With Friends
5. Primary Loyalties (with Hal Colebatch & Andrew Lansdown)
6. Fighting in the Shade
Fiction
1. The Treatment
2. The Cure
3. Flies of a Summer
4. Fresh Fields
** Fighting in the Shade **
Fighting in the Shade
(Poetry)
Peter Kocan
Hale & Iremonger, 2000
ISBN: 086-806-689-3
4 POEMS FROM FIGHTING IN THE SHADE
Signs
Of the circle of people known to me,
Not one appears to have an easy mind.
The more I look at them the more I see
How this one falters, that one falls behind.
Money, health, careers, relationships,
All areas of life seem under strain.
They all seem fundamentally at grips
With nagging worry, weariness and pain.
I am speaking of merely local grief,
Of little realms of personal despair;
Yet one might notice in a single leaf
The blighting of the forest everywhere.
from Fighting in the Shade
© Peter Kocan
The Fathers
A little boy bewildered
I made my way alone.
The world was full of fathers
But none of them my own.
So it was no man’s duty
To teach me what he knew,
To help me or defend me
Or guide me as I grew.
But then I learned of heroes
Long gone into the grave;
The legends of the loyal,
The sagas of the brave.
Through history they laboured
For me the friendless waif,
To see that I’d be happy,
To see that I’d be safe.
And in their stern example,
And in their sad renown,
I found the patrimony
That they had handed down.
Those dead men who befriended
A child they didn’t know
Were my heroic fathers
Long centuries ago.
from Fighting in the Shade
© Peter Kocan
What It Takes
And every man in every generation,
Tossing in his dilemma on his bed,
Cries to the shadows of the noble dead.
—W. H. Auden
For decades they have crowded in my mind,
The Spartans and the Romans and the rest,
Lit by their tragic sunset from behind
And holding out at Duty’s curt behest.
But more and more of late I start to see
How I commit the treasons of despair,
Doubting that any duty’s left to me,
That anyone would notice or would care.
And in the darkness as I toss and turn,
And cry aloud to any passing wraith,
I understand that it is time to learn
A bit of what it takes to keep the faith—
For too long I complacently assumed
Those heroes perished in a golden glow,
And that they hardly minded being doomed
Knowing their myth would deepen and would grow.
Yet they were men of ordinary earth,
And perhaps each met the end he seemed to choose
In anguished wondering if it was worth
The one and only life he had to lose.
It’s one thing to see such heroism
Through the simplifying haze of the years,
Another to perform it at the time
Amid darkness and confusion and tears.
from Fighting in the Shade
© Peter Kocan
Courage
For Tracey Kesby and others
I’d thought of it as Epic,
And opposing famous odds,
And attended by a chorus
Of the heroes and the gods.
I’d thought it must be Saga,
And that bravery must mean
The thunder and the lightning
Of a great dramatic scene.
But now I’m growing wiser
And I start to see the way
That courage has its essence
In the ordinary day.
And now I often notice,
In some unheroic face,
The spirit of the ages
And the valour of the race.
from Fighting in the Shade
© Peter Kocan
** Standing With Friends **
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Standing With Friends
(Poetry)
Peter Kocan
William Heinemann Australia, 1992
ISBN: 0-85561-491-9
4 POEMS FROM STANDING WITH FRIENDS
Standing With Friends
Increasingly it starts to strike me how
We limit friendship to the here and now,
To those we are involved with face to face,
To people of a certain time and place,
To what the fleeting present will allow.
Yet think of the uncounted thousands, too,
Whose flesh and blood and spirit got us through,
Who brought the world along the single track
Which led to where we now stand looking back,
Those benefactors that we never knew.
They were the rulers who upheld the good,
The fighters who defended what they could,
The scholars who kept knowledge half-alive,
All those who had the courage and the drive
To do their duty as they understood.
And many more whose contribution lay
In simply being human in their day,
Who probably had little cause to think
Their ordinary lives would be the link
To us who live a thousand years away.
One can almost see them if one tries,
Those men and women in a quainter guise,
Those dear companions on their faded page,
Whom we, in this peculiar modern age,
Are prompted to belittle and despise.
But I will stand with friends beyond compare
Whose silent bones are littered everywhere,
Who fought and laboured for us long ago
Without the slightest evidence to show
Whether we’d deserve it or would care.
from Standing With Friends
© Peter Kocan
Poor Me
Poor me, one thinks, poor unfortunate me,
Nursing a cold, a migraine, a cut thumb;
Or when one is lost or broken or lonely;
Or if the awaited letter hasn’t come.
We call it being wrapped-up in oneself;
And yet, to feel compassionate must mean
That a part of the mind is standing off
And observing the pathos of the scene.
And this emotion, far from being false,
Might just as well be admirable and true
—Seeing yourself somehow as someone else
Who needs a little sympathy from you.
from Standing With Friends
© Peter Kocan
Beijing Massacre
If only they had kept it out of sight,
The way these things are usually done,
They could’ve murdered hundreds every night
And it would not have worried anyone.
If they had made the victims disappear
Discreetly in the dark by ones and twos,
They could’ve done the job without fear
That it would cause a ripple on the news.
If only the had had the sense to kill
More tidily, and in the proper place,
Then we in fairness would be lauding still
Their Communism-with-a-human-face.
If they had stuck to the accepted scheme,
Had butchered steadily, without fuss,
The patent good intent of the regime
Would’ve remained an axiom to us.
But carnage as a Media Event?
That was a mad, unprecedented move.
Their hideous miscalculation meant
We had no option but to disapprove.
from Standing With Friends
© Peter Kocan
A Baby Crying
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools
—King Lear
Nine pounds of undiluted blank despair
Shrieks all its tiny force into the air.
O what can ail the little fellow snug
Inside a nice embroidered bunny-rug?
The new arrival surely can’t have had
A chance to meet with anything so bad:
He doesn’t know a thing about the State,
Or Politics, or History or Fate.
Yet the harried listeners recognise
A just amount of anguish in the cries.
This small philippic from the cradle hurled
Is baby’s estimation of the world.
And baby’s wise to howl it at the start,
Considering how soon the years impart
A dire sense of being, in the main,
Too deeply implicated to complain.
from Standing With Friends
© Peter Kocan
** Freedom to Breathe **
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Freedom to Breathe
(Poetry)
Peter Kocan
Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1985
ISBN: 0 207 15190 3
2 POEMS FROM FREEDOM TO BREATHE
AIDS, Among Other Things
The wages of sin is death. These words run
With a quiet persistence in my brain,
As though that biblical archaic phrase
Had been precisely meant to diagnose
What’s bothering an unreligious man
Like me today. The blasphemy was met
By sins of silence, cowardice and doubt,
And so we muddied what clear light might thresh
The good from the bad or merely foolish
When the consequences begin to hit.
I fear that we have too glibly mocked
For too long in the word and in the act
To hope we’ve any second chances owed
Or plead extenuation when we’re paid
The wages we knew always to expect.
We acquiesce to birth-in-bottles now,
Dissimulate on every law we knew
Was solemn in the covenants we had
With whatever we call Nature or God,
Yet we never think to reap what we sow.
The ills multiply as we unlearn
That ancient wise humility of men
Who saw, beyond the wreckage of taboos,
Despair and madness, hatred and disease—
The promised payment in the promised coin.
from Freedom to Breathe
© Peter Kocan
To My Godchild, Chloe
Newborn child, at your side
The long-dead generations crowd
Who wept and sweated to preserve
A light until you’d arrive.
I mean civilisation’s wick
That held so long against the dark
And shone a stumbling path clear
Through calamity and war.
Now the darkness gathers fresh
In empires of the lie and lash
Our candle’s guttering away
To outcomes we cannot see.
You are already summoned
To the battles of the mind
And hard experience will show
Past any word I offer now.
I have my own sins to face
Of folly and of cowardice,
But yet I say to choose your sides
Without measuring the odds;
As did Plataea, little town,
That sent its handful to join
Those reckless Athenians
Hurrying to Marathon.
from Freedom to Breathe
© Peter Kocan
See several more poems by Peter Kocan on this website
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