Dark Wind Blowing

Dark Wind Blowing is the title of the second collection of poems published in 1961 by the Australian poet, lecturer and opera critic Valentine Thomas Vallis (1916 - 2009). After his death, his heirs commissioned Elena Kats-Chernin to set some of his texts to music. She composed a song cycle, choosing five poems from the Collection - a loosely woven narrative that traverses an arc from first love to the death of love. Vallis’ often melancholic poetry draws on his life and his experiences as a philosopher, a soldier, a homosexual and is imbued with experiences of loss, denial, but also with a fine sense of art and with the impressions of nature in his Homeland.