Lythrum Press

This digressive collection of essays, extracts, cartoons and poems is unified by an interest in colonial and post-colonial responses to London. It stems from a 2003 conference, ‘Writing London’, organised by Flinders University’s Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English (CRNLE). Part 1 focuses on the Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang (1927–92), in particular his posthumously published and wry first novel, London Does Not Belong To Me (2003), from which this book takes its name: ‘London was full of rooms. I went from one to the other. Slowly I adjusted myself and lived the life of the troglodyte, learning the tribal customs of feints and apologies.’ Part 2 comprises examples of, and critical and scholarly essays relating to, literary, journalistic, artistic and cinematic responses to London (mostly by Australians).

Under a Medlar Tree is Syd Harrex’s fifth slim collection since his first, Atlantis, came out twenty years ago. With connections to both Tasmania and South Australia, Harrex has travelled widely and appears to be one of those poets who has made that Faustian bargain with academia where Mephistopheles says: ‘I will deliver you much material (but not the time to use it).’ Such a trade-off seems to ensure that its signatory will be an occasional poet, a poet of travel pieces, of dedications and elegies, of small moments saved and treasured between bouts of academic writing. As befits a man under such pressures, much of Harrex’s poetry has been about love and death. With Under a Medlar Tree, this is even more the case.