About a week ago, I visited a second hand store to browse some clothes and hopefully pick me up a bargain. I love second hand shops because you can spend hours in there having a bit of a look-see and you never know what you could find. Usually I walk away with more books than anything else.

I found this book (180 pp) called The Call of the Gums which is an old book (it’s going for about $20 but I found it for $3). Naturally I bought it because I wanted to read some of Australia’s “bush” poetry.

I haven’t read poetry. We did some of it at school learning Banjo Patterson or Henry Lawson but that’s it. I can’t remember much of it either. However reading through the anthology of poems about Australia in the late 1800s and early 1900s gives you a snapshot of what life – and how difficult life was back then at the whim of the harsh climate.

Yesterday I tweeted Banjo Patterson’s Clancy of the Overflow. Such a brilliant poem – have a read of this.

What I loved is that Simon Terry (@simongterry) then created his own poem inspired by it but with a current feel to it. ? He called his poem Clancy@Stackoverflow.

Here’s some more of the excellent poetry from the book:

And then to top it off, he wrote a second one