Returning to The Ghost Names Sing, it really is an unusual title, where did it come from?
One thing I’m lousy at in individual poems and books is titles. So when you’re at a loss for them you go looking in the poems. With my first book which is called Listening at Night, the title was suggested to me by a poet friend, Robert Gray. It’s the title of one of the minor poems in the book; he said it’s good to use one of the minor poems for the title because it throws the critics off. With The Ghost Names Sing there wasn’t a title of an individual poem I wanted to use, but there is one poem about an uncle of mine who lived in Adelaide. He died quite suddenly and I hadn’t planned to go to the funeral, but when I found Mum was going from Sydney, I decided to go. It was actually the third trip I’d made to Adelaide in six years, each time for a funeral. It was just as I was sitting on the plane, hearing the engines whirr, thinking about making these trips and the ghost names – the names of people who have gone – sang inside my head. My uncle, my father’s brother, was quite a characte
