The first poem Peter Skrzynecki remembers writing, in 1964, was called ‘The guaranteed clock’, a response to the death of Frank Partridge, who was the youngest Australian to be awarded the Victorian Cross in World War II. Partridge returned to his father’s farm after the war and then became a national celebrity as the self-educated winner of the television show Pick-A-Box. Married late in life with a baby son, Partridge was using his winnings from the quiz show to build a home when he was killed in a car accident on the north coast of New South Wales. Skrzynecki writes, “I could not understand why this should have happened. I don’t have a copy of the poem but the first line was ‘We all see happiness and we all see sorrow/written on the face of a clock.’” While Skrzynecki is more often than not read as an exemplum of the ‘migrant poet’ in Australian poetry, it is his use of poetry to make sense of and accept the impermanence and mystery at the heart of everyday human experience that makes his work as a whole the slow and calming, often confronting, pleasure that it is.