Favourite Runs

Published 1979

Places you drive past, you drive past; places you run through are part of you forever.

In this quote is contained the very core of Helen Menzies's philosophy of running; and in this book are her marvellously-unusual observations and metaphors about the things she sees and smells and hears and feels.

This is a book that has grown out of her daily exhilaration in running not only around the many parklands that encircle Adelaide, but in nearly every country of the world over the last ten years.

The result is an assembly of precise images of dlicate humour from a poet's eye... the 'corridors of air scented with blossom', the dog with the 'face like a cat', the 'neck of a bottle, mouth of a goldfish', trees 'black and prehistoric as dinosaurs' legs', the bird 'saying thoughtfully to itself "crip?"'.

However these reflections may be classified, they are, taken together, a song of praise to the joy and well-being of running, of people, of all the natural inhabitants of parklands anywhere in the world.