University of Queensland Press

It is never a good moment at a party when, after one and a half drinks, the person you’re talking to pronounces herself ‘a little bit crazy’. You haven’t, as a rule, stumbled into the company of a psychopath; more probably, the opposite. The person who feels the need to claim craziness is nearly always the dullest, most conformist person in the room, and now you need to find a civil way of escaping her. Something similar obtains with self-­attributions of a good sense of humour.

‘I never thought Australia needed culture of any kind,’ drawls Barry Humphries in Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley’s recent documentary on Australian ‘trash’ cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Perverse aesthete that he is, Humphries cannot resist the idea that lack of refinement might be a sign of vitality: ‘Culture is yoghurt, isn’t it, or mould? It grows on decaying things.’

In these litigious days, should I declare a tenuous bias in favour of David Brooks (whom I know not at all)? According to an extensive list of previous publications, which includes poetry, short fiction, essays and one earlier novel, he has devoted several editorial enterprises to the poet A.D. Hope. I too admired Hope, for his passionate admiration for Russian literature, which he sometimes lectured on and which made him a complimentary examiner of my own PhD thesis. Otherwise, the slate is blank: I tried to locate Brooks’s previous novel, The House of Balthus (1995) as preparatory reading for this review, but the local library system could not help.

Given the Howard government’s recent proposal to include the compulsory study of selected aspects of Australian history for secondary school students, perhaps it is time for more educators to follow the lead of Nicholas Jose and others in urging that Australian literature occupy a more prominent place in the school curriculum. Literature – and poetry in particular – does not have the political buzz that history possesses (especially since the recent ‘history wars’ have worked their way into public discourse), but there is a need for some healthy consciousness-raising about the flourishing state of Australian writing, which is often better understood beyond our shores than it is at home.

Peter Skrzynecki’s substantial Old/New World comprises selected work from his eight previous collections plus a new collection. From it we could extract his autobiography. We find the youthful son of Polish migrants; his growing awareness of his migrant ‘otherness’; his employment as a teacher in New England; the birth of his first child; the ageing and death of his parents; his passage through middle age and growing sense of his own mortality. Halfway through, ‘Letters from New England’ posits the poet as ‘the stranger from Europe’ – a surrogate title for this often moving compilation. Skrzynecki’s Polish parents came to Australia from Germany in 1949, and exile, for their four-year-old son, would be a recurring theme.

Angela Gardner’s Parts of Speech is a lengthy first collection that ranges from experiments in ‘language’ poetry to meditations on science, the Iraq war, art and memory. It is an ambitious but rather uncertain book. The five-page title poem is in the mode of Peter Minter (who supplies an approving blurb). There are some original images and gritty, memorable lines (‘hookangles that held hold / while mortality / threadscrews experience’), but these are imprisoned by a relentlessly unvaried rhythm that makes it difficult for a reader to find a way in. And there is something merely conventional about the way this poem earnestly contrasts the freedoms of parrot, sky and elephant with the presumed artificiality of language, ‘mute text’ and ‘discredited Euclidean geometry’. This poem was too passive; it needed to be more of a genuine – serious and adventurous – interrogation of language. Similarly, ‘Embedded’ attempts to look at the Iraq war as a problem of rhetoric (‘the President’s words’) – an interesting idea, but Gardner’s own heavyhanded moral rhetoric remains surprisingly unexamined, and the reader’s approval is taken for granted.

Dimitris Tsaloumas is often thought of as a poet writing between two languages. In his English poetry, this emerges in the way that the everyday diction of Greek often functions as the learned register of English. ‘Nostalgia’, as a compound word, is a modern Western coining, but when Tsaloumas opens the volume with ‘Nostalgia: A Diptych’, he evokes the Greek components of the word, particularly nostos with its connotation of Homeric return.

In 2005, Lisa Gorton, writing in ABR, named Paddy O’Reilly’s The Factory one of the best books of the year. It was O’Reilly’s first novel, but she was already well established as a prize-winning writer of short stories. The End of the World is a collection of those stories, and should secure her reputation as one of our most interesting, if not best-known, literary talents.

Recipient of the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Nathan Shepherdson’s surrealist, free-verse début, Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror, is to be commended for its emotional bravery and its originality. At the collection’s Queensland launch, Shepherdson described what he had hoped to achieve in writing an extended elegy to his mother, Noela Mary Shepherdson. The poems were to be seen as gifts or letters – one for each of Noela’s seventy-two years – and represented a son’s attempt to honour his mother’s life.