for Yumna Kassab

As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
                springs over and we say ‘sky’

Biographers nearly always rejoice to find a bundle of letters. If both sides of a correspondence have survived, it doubles the pleasure. At its best, an exchange that was maintained over a long period will illuminate personality, time, and place. Love letters are probably the most highly prized. Whether or not the lovers have the gift of words, their closeness in a relationship brings a sense of reality. Readers of some self-revealing intimate letters may feel like intruders, uninvited watchers at a private theatre for which they didn’t buy a ticket.

In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

The celebrity ghost-written memoir is the non-fiction form de nos jours. Publishers see it as a winner that combines quality narrative with mass-market appeal. Such memoirs do not even need to contain fresh insight when there is an established fanbase. Just ask Prince Harry about the trouble it causes when a revelation does shock. The idea that a pope should put his name to a co-developed text is nevertheless novel. Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly. Piccolomini’s Commentaries, though light-hearted Latin, are also a self-indulgent, self-justifying piece of self-invention. The precedent for Francis does not encourage.

This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?

Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria. He lives on Wadawurrung country. Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His newest collection, Southsightedness, was published in April by Transit Lounge.

‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.

Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.

Genealogy television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? often feature the celebrity gasping – in surprise, excitement, even alarm – as details of their family tree are revealed. Belinda Probert, a distinguished British-born Melbourne academic, had her own moment of incredulity when, four months after her father, Bill, was buried in 1994, her family received a letter from his nephew Denzil. For Denzil, Bill was not Bill, but Uncle Roy, who had spent his childhood living in an impoverished Welsh coal mining village in the Rhondda, and whose mother and siblings were alive when Bill’s children were born. All this was complete news to Bill’s family.