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The cover says it all. The photograph comes from the Cole Inquiry, but it could be from any number of recent events. In the centre is Prime Minister John Howard, smiling without hubris, a confident leader going about the business of leadership, ready to inform the Cole Inquiry what he knew and what he was never officially told. But the prime minister is not alone. Blacked out on either side are two of his security detail: ‘fit for office’ does not begin to describe the appearance of lean efficiency of this pair of male and female minders. Just behind them are two classic minders, both more than a little tense but featured in bold colour, one with eyes up as if anticipating the show of prime ministerial confidence; the other with eyes lowered, anticipating what might go wrong. Not that it does.

Toward the end of his life, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), French poet and founding father of Symbolism, published the prose collection Divagations (1897). This highly ambitious, eclectic work, a repository of Mallarmé’s aesthetic, revitalises the critical enterprise and shakes the very foundations of the literary act. His practice is inaugural, effecting a critique of the subject and of poetry that is unprecedented. Divagations shows the mature Mallarmé at the height of his achievement, inventing a new form of poetic journalism. From the outset, we are invited to read differently. These consummate, diverse pieces, comprising prose poems, lectures, journalism and portraits, are truncated from their original context and strategically redeployed. They illuminate each other differently and acquire a new potency, in tune with the poet’s vision of words in verse interacting like reflective jewels. The dazzling pieces on dance and current events provide a radical critique of contemporary values and show a sense of humour more familiar to readers of Mallarmé’s fashion journal. High and low interchange as the apparently trivial or frivolous acquires seminal status. The ‘Important Miscellaneous News Items’ offer some of the greatest examples of the new ‘Popular Poem’, celebrating the insight and autonomy of the modern reader.

Graham Swift’s fine novel Last Orders (1996) is propelled by the motif of a group of middle-aged men, with a shared past, brought together again by a single goal. In their case, it is the matter of casting the ashes of a dead friend into the sea. The narrative dips into the characters’ past to acquaint us with the nature of the ties that bind – have bound – them to each other and to the dead man.

If the central, not-made-much-of miracle in Craig Sherborne’s remarkable memoir Hoi Polloi (2005) is the disappearance of the narrator’s childhood stutter after a blow to the head, then the equivalent motif in Muck, Hoi Polloi’s equally fine sequel, is his voice.

Gunther Grass, in his suave and controversial memoirs, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, 2007, trans. Michael Henry Heim), rehearses many of the modern autobiographer’s qualms about the biddability of memory. Grass, with his long history of attacking other Germans’ wartime activities while concealing his own service in the Tenth SS Armoured Division, has every incentive to question the memoirist’s primary tool. ‘When pestered with questions,’ Grass writes, ‘memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.’ Changing metaphors, Grass contends with memory’s caprices and slippages: ‘Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.’

Gina Mercer is not a prolific poet, and reading her latest collection it is evident that her poems are not written in haste. It has been eight years since her first, well-received book Oceans in the Kitchen (1999). More recently, she was featured in the Wagtail booklet series, where it would seem that many of the poems in Handfeeding the Crocodile have already appeared, in addition to their original publications in literary magazines.

Notwithstanding the old adage, you can tell a certain amount about a book by its cover, especially if it has two covers, each displaying a different subtitle. The British edition of Forgotten Wars, on sale in Australian bookshops, has the subtitle ‘The End of Britain’s Asian Empire’. The cover photograph shows Lord Louis Mountbatten, in spotless white naval uniform, inspecting a guard of honour of Burmese soldiers in 1948. The soldiers appear smart and loyal, while the Burmese civilian accompanying Mountbatten is deferential. The American edition of the book, published under the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, has the less precise but more evocative subtitle ‘Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia’, and a cover with a blurred photograph of a truckload of Asians celebrating ‘Independence Day’. The caption identifies neither the country nor the date, but a likely candidate would be India in 1947.

As the full extent of the American misadventure in Iraq becomes increasingly clear, liberal hawks, neo-conservatives and others who lent their voices to the initial call to arms have had cause to reconsider their positions. The rush to recant, however, has not exactly been a stampede. For the majority of its proponents, the decision to invade Iraq was so tied to an entrenched philosophy or ideology that to renounce the invasion would entail a more wide-reaching abandonment.