Alex Skovron is the author of five collections of poetry and a prose novella. A bilingual selection of his poetry in French translation titled The attic was published in 2013, and his novella The poet (2005) has recently been translated into Czech. A New & selected poems is forthcoming. Alex was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958, aged nine. Since 1980 he has been based in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor.

The Elephant in the Clock

A personal fantasia

An exploration of the author’s abiding interest in the nature of time, memory, the force of the past, and the promptings of nostalgia. His speculations touch on notions of the past’s ‘reachability’, the question of fate and free will, and more implicitly on the impulse to faith and transcendence. The discussion is counterpointed with a range of examples from his poetry in which these concerns are foregrounded or implied.