Secret Destinations

a book of poetry by Charles Causley, published in 1984. The short stanzaic units, traditional, rhythms, and subtly mannered tones prevalent in his earlier work were displaced in Secret Destinations by more capacious forms whose longer verse-lines were suited to a mode more suggestive of the cadences of speech. The quasi-mythological colouring which his treatments of the past had tended to take on through his use of ballad forms was annulled by the detailed realism in his poems of local and familial history. A widening of his poetry's cultural and geographic compass was effected by the emergence of a European frame of reference and the inclusion of material produced by his experiences of Australia and Canada. The collection was acclaimed for its breadth of subject matter, technical originality, and the poise of its sombrely retrospective poems, in which Peter Porter found ‘powerful images of disquiet’.