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, chosing 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.