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I have always been puzzled by society’s readiness to send their young men into battle, and that the young men go, and then tell such lies when they get home about what they saw when they looked on the face of battle. I hadn’t wondered about women, except to be glad that they were exempt from combat. Now comes Mischa Merz’s Bruising, which is about fear, aggression, and courage, and written out of her experience of one-to-one combat in the boxing ring.

No more critically acute or challenging collection of essays on the subject has been published than Ken Stewart’s modestly titled Investigations in Australian Literature. Yet the author’s personality is not similarly subdued. The Stewart known in person to many readers of ABR emerges unselfconsciously: erudite but undogmatic, rueful and witty, a touch dishevelled, one of the most beguiling and persuasive of teachers about Australia and its literature. We are fortunate that – through the agency of the admirable Shoestring Press – this volume exists to demonstrate the coherence, conceptual clarity, and spirit of delight that imbues Stewart’s criticism of much that has been written here, at least to the middle of the century.

Mark O’Connor is a poet who has been in the news lately. Following in the steps of the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, he was appointed (by the Australia Council) as ‘official’ Olympic poet – though it seems inevitable that much of his work will concern only the Olympic flame on its way to the Games and the events to be seen on TV since neither SOCOG nor the Australia Council saw fit to give him a journalist's pass. Unfortunately, all this Olympic fuss has tended to obscure his work of three decades up to this point, a journey well represented in his recent The Olive Tree: Collected poems.

The new books from Ron Pretty’s Five Islands Press are impressive début collections. Importantly, where are the poets taking us? Are there discernible trends? Without generalising excessively, violent themes recur and the poets are interested in how societies transgress their limits. The collections have a narrative or developmental thrust often well served by the ordering of the poems. There is forthrightness; the language is clear, attentive, and contemporary. Best of all, the poems aren’t dull.

‘We had always been close’ is the first sentence of Kim Mahood’s beautifully crafted memoir. She is speaking of her father who was killed in a helicopter crash while mustering cattle on his remote Queensland property. Craft for a Dry Lake is about the journey she made through the outback country of her childhood following his death.

Ten years ago, when she was in her early fifties, Inga Clendinnen fell ill with a disease of the liver that would have killed her if transplant surgery had not improved in time to save her life. In hospital she began to write, as much to hold herself together as for any other reason. Without a trace of self-pity she tells of the frightening first symptoms of her illness, its diagnosis and the initial gloomy prognosis, her times in hospitals, her responses to the hospital, to other patients and to that special group of ‘comrades’ who have suffered the same illness and its awesome treatment.