Hybrid Publishers

The last two lines of Tony Page's Dawn the Proof (Hybrid Publishers, $25 pb, 87 pp, 9781925272239) ask 'how to seize / the grains of now'. One of Page's (implicit) ...

In one of these beautifully crafted prose poems, the speaker, recalling his childhood self, says that ‘I was gradually learning my own name, though there are times when the knowledge escapes me still, and another reveals itself’. This suggests complex trajectories of the self in time: self-knowledge comes ‘gradually’, but at times cedes to another, more profound, self-transcending form of knowing. Alex Skovron’s work, which includes four earlier volumes of verse and a novella, often counterposes two dispositions towards the self: a schematising impulse to ‘chart’ the ‘soul’, and a heuristic delight in the liberating processes of self-transcendence. Some of the ‘autographs’ – the accounts and traces of the self – that comprise this volume are of the first kind, others of the second. The book does not so much adjudicate between these kinds as embed them in a loose, fugue-like structure which is rich in delicate shadings, contrasts and variations. The book’s three sections – ‘Dance’, ‘Labyrinth’, and ‘Shadow’ – indicate axes of imaginative exploration rather than lines of narrative progression. Yet, cumulatively, the fifty-six poems in this collection nurture a passion for transcendence and a fear of excessive schematisation, the latter associated in this Jewish writer’s work with fundamentalism and totalitarianism.

The word ‘memoir’ is used with a nice precision in the title of this beautifully written book. The Macquarie Dictionary distinguishes between the singular and the plural meanings of the word: ‘memoirs’ are autobiographical, ‘records of one’s own life and experiences’; a ‘memoir’ is a biography. Almost all of the book is written in the voice of its protagonist, Bette Boyanton, with some sharp interventions from her daughter Gina; her husband Les is credited as a co-author, though he does not speak. But the book also stands firmly as a biography, elegantly crafted by its major author, Carolyn Landon.

The Poet is an unusual book. Dispensing with many of the conventions that underpin most extended works of prose fiction, such as significant characterisation, it presents a central protagonist, Manfred, who is ‘honest’ – as the author repeatedly states. Manfred is also a poet. The novella is written in formal and refined prose, as if the narrative style is designed to reflect Manfred’s obsessional nature and estranged condition: he has never been ‘in love’, is ‘something of a loner’ and is highly anxious.

Janina Milek – born in Poland in 1921, shunted out of it with her parents and siblings by the Russians to become human draught horses in Siberia in 1940, released via Uzbekistan to a refugee camp in Iran in 1942, transferred to another refugee camp in Lusaka in Africa in 1943, and shipped to Australia in 1950 – told Tim Chappell that her family was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she finally had some kind of say as to where she might live (an Australian commission offered places to healthy persons from the African camp), the one thing she knew was that she would not go back to Poland and live ‘on the back of an old woman’s tongue’ (Janina’s marvellous phrase for gossip mongering). Her mother, to whom Janina had been completely devoted, suddenly announced that she wanted only to return home. Janina was deserted by the one person she now lived to care for.