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Anthology

The ABC Shop is currently selling online The Best Australian Stories 2010 for $14.99. ‘Ideal for summer reading’ its advertising says, and it surely doesn’t matter which summer. At that price you might get yourself a copy and sling it in your beach bag, unless you suspect it might dampen your holiday mood. More than a few reviewers found the overall tone of the collection bleak and negative: ‘one of the more depressing reads of the year’, wrote Chris Flynn in these pages (February 2011). If that doesn’t sound like ideal beach reading, shell out the full RRP and buy The Best Australian Stories 2011.

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Bronwyn Lea has chosen ‘Beginnings’ as the theme for the first issue of Poetry Australia’s new journal. The Editor has some interesting things to say about a poem’s ‘beginning’ in her Foreword, but the journal doesn’t as yet have the feel of something fresh, lively, and distinctive that a beginning promises ...

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The war of religion currently being fought with fusillades of paperbacks and feuilletons has taken a new turn. It started with an ambuscade by the ‘new’ atheists – also known as ‘militant’ or ‘Darwinian’ atheists – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the ubiquitous Christopher Hitchens (may he remain so). They were quickly joined by many sympathisers sharing the belief that peace, secularism, and rationality are under assault, not only from religious extremists, but also from the root religious ideas and attitudes that are presumed to nourish them.

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With 1086 pages of poems and critical biographies, Australian Poetry Since 1788 – the third anthology co-edited by Robert Gray and myself – is by far the largest anthology of Australian poetry to date, and at least twice the size of its predecessors. Perhaps controversially, it has fewer poets than many earlier anthologies, with only 174 named poets. But it covers the gamut of Australian poetry, including convict and bush ballads, translations of Aboriginal songs, humorous verse, concrete poetry, and generous selections of Australia’s major poets and of the younger contemporary poets. We have tried to be catholic, rigorous, and objective, while listening carefully (with our very subjective ears) to the many different voices from which we had to choose.

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On 18 January 1773, less than twenty-four hours after first entering Antarctic waters and concerned by the ice gathering around the Resolution, Commander James Cook surveyed the waters. A few hours later he wrote in his journal: ‘From the mast head I could see nothing to the Southward but Ice, in the Whole extent from East to WSW without the least appearance of any partition.’

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In 1956, when this fourth volume of his collected prose begins, W.H. Auden (1907–73) was forty-nine and widely recognised as one of the most important English-language poets. He had been in the United States for seventeen years, having left, or, as some back home had seen it, abandoned England shortly before the outbreak of World War II; and he had been an American citizen since 1946. To me, he always remained an English poet, and the lexical flourishes such as ‘dives’ and ‘congress’ found in the second half of his oeuvre do little to hide a European sensibility.

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Anyone who hasn’t caught up with the thriving diversity of recent Australian poetry should get hold of this second annual anthology from Black Inc. edited by Robert Adamson. It’s a richly impressive selection from all corners of the Australian poetic field and across the generations, from Bruce Dawe and Frank Kellaway to younger poets yet to publish a first book. For more specialist readers, with a comparative eye on contemporary poetry in English, Adamson’s soundings demonstrate amply how mature and vital Australian poetry is.

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The Best Australian Stories 2010 edited by Cate Kennedy  & New Australian Stories 2 edited by Aviva Tuffield

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February 2011, no. 328

Amore appropriate moniker for this year’s Black Inc. collection might be ‘Bleak Australian Stories 2010’. Either the editor’s taste runs to the morose or Australian writers need to venture outside and enjoy the sunshine a little more...

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The great Russian short story writer Ivan Bunin said that in the process of becoming a writer, ‘one learns not to invent, but to see clearly...

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While the stories in The Kid on the Karaoke Stage vary thematically, they are predominantly realist in style, with plenty of seemingly serendipitous through-lines. Georgia Richter, who has edited the collection superbly, says that she was interested in ‘the way we turn to writing to crystallise moments of realisation’. The authors all have links to West ...