Marion May Campbell

The title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement. Several reviewers have commented on the work’s intertextuality (Campbell often employs compositional strategies such as parody, allusion, calque). Always the audience or reader is integral to shaping the text. For Campbell, importantly, the unsaid or unquestioned are as important as collaged lyric or contemporary language trace, as seen in these lines from the first poem in the collection, ‘speechless’:

In 1952, Marion May Campbell’s father was killed in an apocalyptic accident when his World War II RAAF Dakota was knocked out of control by contact with a waterspout and was ‘unable to effect recovery’. There were no survivors and little wreckage. The outmoded Dakota was on loan to the CSIRO to ...

Whereas many twenty-first-century novels seem way too long, konkretion is a distilled, complex gem. It is a novella full of questions and questing, most of which riff from this observation made in the context of Germany’s militant Red Army Faction: ‘what triggers the conversion from resistance to terror, flick-knife or otherwise, the jump into illegality? – oh the primacy of praxis, that romance of struggle masking murder.’

Over the last two decades, Ross Gibson has earned an outstanding reputation for ground-breaking investigations into cultural memory, image and place, and for his strikingly innovative films and installations, his curatorial work on the Photographic Collection of the Sydney Justice & Police Museum, his foundational directorship of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and, of course, his highly imaginative non-fictional writing. With its eponymous allusions to William Empson and to Jonathan Raban, his Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) announced its own haunting by earlier explorations of the pastoral and of the irreducible ambiguities in history’s traces.

The last thing Marion May Campbell is, is laid back. From the beginning she has been a writer high on etymology, delirious with the possibilities of form and narrative, peculiarly subject to what Genet described as the ‘horizontal vertigo’ of writing. In her novels Lines of Flight (1985), Not Being Miriam (1988), Prowler (1999) and the most recent, Shadow Thief (2006), she has displayed a constitutional aversion to the more sociological approaches to literary art. Realism, in other words, is not for her. More than anything, it is language itself that has been Campbell’s subject.