The Scar-Tree is a selection of poems focused on John Mateer’s early work. Intended for a new generation of readers who would not have encountered his first six books on their publication in Australia, it will shed new light on work that has been in circulation since the early 1990s. In the past two decades John Mateer became principally known as a poet of travel, someone who pursues an Elsewhere. So it has become necessary to revive the early, ‘Australian’ phase of his writing, poems which were written in the ten years that bridge the turn of the Millennium, a period when he was based in Perth/Boorloo, then in Melbourne/Naarm, and repeatedly travelled across the southern half of the continent, also visiting Tasmania. One aspect of this new selection is the emphasis on the more personal aspects of his work, such that the so-called ‘nature poems’ and the more socially engaged and political content for which he is best known in Australia can be seen in the context of other, less visible, shifts and displacements. The preparation of this book began in 2017. During the development of The Scar-Tree, the poet reordered previously poems, placing them in the order of composition, and he reworked, sometimes significantly, a small number of them. Among this selection are unpublished poems that were either omitted from those early books in the process of editing them, or were found in recent years among the notebooks and other papers of his archive. With one exception, it contains all the poems the poet currently wishes to reprint from the years 1993 to 2003, as well as an Afterword in which he provides an insight into the background of this selection.
