'Manfred Jurgensen's is a poetry of passion, embracing with great sweep and cultured ease the passions of history, of culture, of a lover whose vision is individualised by its often surrealist imagery, laying both complex and humane claims on us… His poetry, elegiac, allegorical, celebrative, moves through the garden of the world, naming, like Adam, the many-faceted creations lit by its light.'
Bruce Dawe
'How much longer can Manfred Jurgensen continue to improve as a poet? With each new volume the range and variety of his themes strengthen. There is now no form, poetic or prose-poetic, that is beyond his grip. His sense of humour, once piano, is now, like his sense of pain, forte. Most important of all, Jurgensen's verse is delightfully accessible. For a modern this is the ultimate virtue. Manfred Jurgensen has never been that dire thing - a poet to watch - but is indubitably now that splendid thing - a poet to attack.'
Jack Hibberd
My Operas Can't Swim,
Jacaranda Press,
Brisbane 1989
pelican
in my childhood you were
a fountain-
pen, refillable tank, heavy in flight,
carrying your own light
blue waterways,
a present, or prized object of exchange,
with veritable
hunting seasons when theft
was easy game. our genitals came later,
taking
off in estuaries and protected foreshore.
now i watch you crowd fisherman's
wharf,
a natural still at large, as one by one
time's chartered craft are
leaving for the islands.
in the early afternoon
you give birth
to your reflection, hovering as fluid image
next to its
unlikely make, the well-lit shadow
of our early chases, the rhymes you fed
me
on your blood, the promises and mysteries
your pouched bill kept in
loving stock.
i try to feed you, but your hunger moves away.
in the inky
diary almost forty years ago
we had drawn the passage and the port.
as you
leave, you turn, momentarily motionless, at one.