Interactive Press

David Rowbotham is a Queensland poet whose first book was published nearly fifty years ago. His career has a shape that is often found in the arts: a quiet figure whose work is politely rather than rhapsodically received, and whose reputation grows almost by a process of attrition until, eventually, he is one of the few of his contemporaries left standing. It often comes about that a consistent, undemonstrative style, adhered to religiously, itself becomes an important statement, to be rediscovered by a new generation of contemporaries. But this is not quite what has happened in Rowbotham’s case, because his books have changed continuously. He began writing as a young man, returned from the war, discovering for the first time the place in which he had grown up: Ploughman and Poet (1954) may be Bulletin in style, but it is a complex book, and the central oppositions between city and Darling Downs, between manual labour and poetry, remain compelling.

Good writing can take many forms, and I have often wished for a greater mutual appreciation, between poets and journalists, of the fine things with words that both are able to do. Joel Deane and Penelope Layland, former journalists, bring well-honed skills to their first volumes. (Deane is currently the speechwriter for the premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks.) In their work we find much clarity and a strong facility for description. Take, for example, Layland’s ‘Muttonbird Island’: ‘In the dark soil chicks incubate / camouflaged by a silence / they instinctively keep.’ Deane, meanwhile, is flexing his descriptive muscles in ‘Freckle’, a poem about childhood and memories of a long-drowned man: ‘… how, last summer, / when the river bed fell, / they found tissue paper, / once the muscle of a man, / stretched over sunken branches.’

These first novels by Joel Deane, the Victorian premier’s speechwriter, and Merle Thornton, a former academic who famously chained herself to a male-only bar in Brisbane, focus on radically different social groups. Deane’s Another is about two unemployed adolescents living in an outer Melbourne suburb bypassed by a freeway where the local McDonalds is the town’s nucleus. In After Moonlight, Thornton presents a bookstore-browsing, duck-eating, macchiato-sipping, Carltonish academic. (The novel is replete with such portmanteaux.) That both novels are set in the same city is a shock. Another commonality, more poignant, is a concern with the personal and the enduring effects of tragic pasts.

David Reiter’s fourth book, Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems, opens with the selected work followed by poems that may prove difficult for those who find the sparing endnotes insufficient to enlighten them on Reiter’s subtleties, but often exciting for Hemingway aficionados.