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Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someone, somewhere, who’ll be making it, and we’re right to be suspicious.

Every now and again, the future of the book emerges as a topic of anxious discussion among literary types. Will books become obsolete, discarded in favour of electronic reading devices with sleek design and smooth contours, or merely lose relevance given all the digital distractions? Literary Melbourne is one publication which betrays no such anxieties. Published to mark Melbourne’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, it is not only a celebration of all things literary but an assertion of the history, relevance and power of books, writing and ideas. Yet, like the city whose literary culture it celebrates, this volume speaks rather than shouts. The muted tones of its cover, echoed throughout in shades of sepia, brown and grey, announce that this is no flamboyant publication: for all its evocation of city streets, it is an ‘indoor’ book, inviting reflection and discussion. Above all, as indicated by small courtesies such as the ‘Ex Libris’ label on the endpage and the ribbon bookmark, this is a book for booklovers, for those hopeless addicts who like to own, hold and return to their books.

Lawrence warned us not to trust the teller, but to trust the tale. Nevertheless, all writers are apt to suffer the fate of being confused or conflated with their works. Maybe it is part of what Goethe entitled Dichtung und Wahrheit. If truth is going to be let into poetry, many readers want to know the facts about the poet: both the jubilant facts and the disconcerting ones. This is not merely irritating nosey-parkerhood. The shimmering glamour of writers is inevitably part of their stock-in-trade. A Byron, a Plath, a Rimbaud, Dickinson or Dylan Thomas has become inseparable from that poet’s reported life, dazzle, sex and dirt. An early death helps no end. It is an example of fatedness which Al Alvarez explored years ago in The Savage God (1971), a title he derived from Yeats talking about Charles Conder and his decadent allies of the 1890s.

Big business is a hard country. Matt Peacock tells the story of the James Hardie company and its venality as the manufacturer of fibro cement products in Australia. The fibro shack has been as iconic a domestic symbol as the Hills hoist, and Australia used more fibro per head than any other developed nation. However, the fibre in fibro for much of the twentieth century was asbestos, exposure to which is lethal.

‘I am interested to know all about you: who you are, how your life developed, from the time your mother was pregnant with you, till today. Are you willing to tell me?’ This request, made by Paul Valent to one of his first patients, is as seductive as it is impossible. The great realist writers of the nineteenth century approached their characters with the same voracious desire to know everything, to explain everything, to have everything revealed. But the psychotherapist’s mission is far more daunting than the novelist’s, for the secrets he aims to uncover are those the subject hides from himself.

Apples with Human Skin is a collection of taut but detached poems. Well crafted, with superb use of diction coupled with tight and inventive forms, the poems remain, however, unrelated to anything in modern-day usage or consciousness. There is a coolness to the writing which can become relentless. Imagery and line structure are evocative and precise, and Shepherdson successfully invents a minimalist syntax in each of the longer chaptered poems. There are also shards of social comment hidden amongst the granite-like structures.

A remarkable ice cream made in 1991 included two thousand eggs, ninety litres of cream and fifty-five litres of milk. No one but Phillip Searle, Australia’s emperor of ice cream, would have set out to make Ball and Chain, a giant, medieval, spiked weapon which melted in the mouth. The spikes themselves were thirty-centimetre silver-leaf-tipped cones of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sorbet, and these were broken from the enormous ball, which had been sculpted around a heavy iron frame. This included long handles so that the servers, naked but smeared with clay, might carry the weapon through the centre of a rectangle of some 180 diners towards the performance of Music for Ball and Chain, composed by Tony Buck and commissioned by Searle. The musical instruments were indeed a ball and chain.

Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.