Peter Steele

The Tree in Changing Light by Roger McDonald

November 2001, no. 236

Roger McDonald seems never to do things twice in the same way. To be solemn about it, he has a mind which is both capacious and vivacious: events, experiences, things at large flood in to stock its territory, and become the livelier from their environment. Refreshed himself by Australia, he refreshes some of it in return.

The Tree in Changing Light is a case in point. This is a meditative work whose attention moves easily from the world’s physicalities and fluctuations to the appraising mind itself and back again. It is fluently, but not trivially, dialectical – an example of well-schooled attention which is itself a kind of schooling. Here, for instance, is an early passage:

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Saving from the Wreck: Essays on poetry by Peter Porter

by Peter Steele •

October 2001, no. 235

Peter Steele reviews 'Saving from the Wreck: Essays on poetry' by Peter Porter

The cover illustration of Peter Porter’s selection of essays shows a mosaic from the Basilica di S. Marco, Venezia, in which Noah leans out from the wall of the Ark and releases the questing dove. The last words of the selection go ...

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Letter from New York

by Peter Steele •

April 2001, no. 229

To dinner as a guest at the Lotos Club, on East 66^th St in New York. Named apparently after Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters’ territory – ‘In the afternoon they came unto a land in which it seemed always afternoon’, not to be confused with Robert Burton’s ‘afternoon men’, who are permanently smashed. The Latos Club’s 1870 Constitution declares its intent to promote and develop literature, art, sculpture and much else. One thing caught my ear, and one my eye. It was the first time I have heard anybody speak in virtually the same breath of ‘my ancestors’ and ‘residuals’. And I was glad to see that the Club boasted yet another painting of Tom Wolfe in (so to speak) full fig, white on white – glad partly because it reminded me that of all the worthy injunctions offered me as a young Jesuit, that against becoming a ‘clerical fop’ has been obeyed triumphantly. One has to start somewhere …

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Author! Author!: Tales of Australian Literary Life edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

by Peter Steele •

October 1998, no. 205

Peter Steele reviews 'Author! Author! Tales of Australian Literary Life' edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

‘Anecdotes’ meant originally ‘the unpublished’ – sometimes, no doubt, the unprintable. Nowadays we think of them as being tales which have something or other up their sleeves: a morsel of irony, a pinch of encouragement, a gesture of affectation. Anecdotes are yarns which have had a couple of drinks.

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Crete by Dorothy Porter

by Peter Steele •

April 1996, no. 179

Peter Steele reviews 'Crete' by Dorothy Porter

‘Byron!’, said Max Beerbohm ‘– he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Com Laws.’ As we know, things turned out otherwise, and Byron lives on, in the hallowed phrase, as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.

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John Hanrahan reviews 'A.D. Hope' by Kevin Hart, 'James McAuley' by Lyn McCredden, 'Peter Porter' by Peter Steele, 'Reconnoitres' edited by Margaret Harris & Elizabeth Webby, 'Annals of Australian Literature' edited by Joy Hooton & Harry Heseltine

by John Hanrahan •

December 1992, no. 147

Oxford University Press has begun a welcome series called Australian Writers. Two further titles, Imre Salusinszky on Gerald Murnane and Ivor Indyk on David Malouf, will appear in March 1993, and eleven more books are in preparation. Though I find the first three uneven in quality, they make a very promising start to a series. In some ways they resemble Oliver and Boyd’s excellent series, Writers and Critics, even being of about the same length. However this new series is less elementary, more demanding of the reader. It is, predictably, far sparser in critical evaluation, concentrating on hermeneutics, and biographical information is as rare as a wombat waltz.

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Marching On Paradise by Peter Steele

by Philip Martin •

September 1986, no. 84

Philip Martin reviews 'Marching On Paradise' by Peter Steele

Peter Steele is a meditative poet with a gift for aphorism: joy / has more of gravity than of gaiety’; ‘You cannot find / your way, but it is finding you’. And of God he saysZ: ‘I’m lost for words except for those to ask / He’ll look my way and make me see it his.’

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Selected Poems by R.A. Simpson & Selected Poems by Vincent Buckley

by Peter Steele •

November 1982, no. 46

Peter Steele reviews 'Selected Poems' by R.A. Simpson and 'Selected Poems' by Vincent Buckley

If any volume of Selected Poems must be in part the autobiography of an imagination, it is subject to the vicissitudes and ironies which attend all autobiography. One gazes at it and finds familiar lineaments, but one also finds mobilities and stands made more evident than a more partial acquaintance can show. The very title is a warning that the whole story –whatever that might be – is not to be found here: a ‘Selected Poems’ is the outcome of recurrent options.

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