Giramondo

Having spent two decades or more writing massive verse novels – The Nightmarkets (1986) and The Lovemakers (2001, 2004) – it may seem that Alan Wearne, with his latest book of poetry, The Australian Popular Songbook, has finally returned to smaller forms and, as suggested by the title, a more lyrical idiom. But, as always with Wearne’s work, things aren’t that simple. The smaller forms were already present in the verse novels in the form of sonnets, villanelles and other verse forms buried in the sprawling architecture of the works’ narratives. The ‘lyrical idiom’ of The Australian Popular Songbook is ambiguous at best, offset as it is by Wearne’s characteristic attraction to the dramatic monologue, satire, vernacular culture and wrenched syntax.

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.

In Lisa Gorton’s first collection of poetry, somewhat ambiguously entitled Press Release, light, absence and doubt are major preoccupations. The poems speak of ‘a weight of light’, ‘neon expectation’, ‘ruined cities overrun with light’ and ‘all that falling light’ – in just the first of this volume’s four sections. Light, for Gorton, is a sometimes mesmerising and often overwhelming force. Among other things, it is the illumination of nostalgia, the halo of memory and the shining-out of presence. Interestingly, it is also about culmination, often standing for various forms of – usually problematic – realisation and achievement. For example, in ‘Scald’, the poem’s persona speaks of ‘light drawn in to the idea of light, all-eye and all / forgetting, more entire than perfection’; and in ‘Guns I / Major Mitchell, 1836:’ wild birds ‘are tearing the blueblack / shadows out of the river’, as if light and life are joined in defying the ruination of death and the depredations of time. But in Gorton’s poetry light never fully escapes the dark, and in ‘Scald’ the ‘sheer of light’ is also a ‘shining blank’, while the poem’s speaker represents herself as a ‘bright / dark torso’, images in which absence, darkness and light are inextricably connected.

joanne burns: There’s a name to conjure with. The familiar lowercase signature – first encountered in my now-tattered copies of 1970s women’s poetry magazines such as Khasmik and Cauldron, and in the anthologies Mother, I’m Rooted (1975) and No Regrets (1979) – now appears on burns’s fourteenth book. An Illustrated History of Dairies offers a generous selection of her verse and prose poems, including the satires on (sub)urban life for which she is well known, condensed narrative pieces, enigmatic fragments linked by flashes of surrealist wit.

Picnic is probably Fay Zwicky’s most confident collection. In it she renounces certain kinds of brilliance for a freer and more open style of poetry – what she calls in one poem ‘the grace of candour’. It is a style that approximates moral qualities: honesty, direct ness, kindness to strangers. And it is in fact such moral qualities that give force to this collection

There is a mesmerising scene in Carpentaria when Joseph Midnight is asked if he has seen the fugitive Will Phantom, a young local Aboriginal man who is single-handedly waging a guerrilla war against a large lead ore mining company. He eyes the questioner and astutely spots him as a ‘Southern blackfella …

Slow in the writing and slow in the reading: it is so easy to drift on the tides of Beverley Farmer’s book, and also to lose your bearings. The three long essays that make up The Bone House are prose poems organised by biorhythms, it seems, rather than by any architectural design. They carry all sorts of startling images in on their tides, like the fragments the writer finds washed up on the shores: ‘A figleaf burning in a patch of sun on the path, a ribbed shell like a boat, balanced on its stalk, a crumple of brown on one side, all its freckles and veins clear in a green pool of light.’

Here is a rich vein of strange rococo fantasy in recent Australian fiction. Tom Gilling (The Sooterkin, 1999), Andrew Lindsay (The Breadmaker’s Carnival, 1998, and The Slapping Man, 2003) and Gregory Day (The Patron Saint of Eels, 2005) have all imagined tragicomic country towns in which miracles and monsters infiltrate the sleepy lives of unsuspecting villagers. The genre can be a trap for inattentive authors: the lines between quirky and cute, touching and twee, are perilously easy to cross. With this comic apocalyptic fantasy, Catherine Rey – who writes in French but lives in Perth – avoids this trap and achieves something more. In an idiom that is part Rabelais, part Old Testament and part Ocker Pub, she creates an hilarious, troubling fable with a distinctly Australian taste.

When John Tranter reviewed Jennifer Maiden’s first collection, Tactics (1974), he noted its ‘brilliant yet difficult imagery’ and a style ‘so idiosyncratic and forceful in a sense it becomes the subject of her work’... 

Nicholas Jose’s new novel, Original Face, begins violently. On the first page, a man is – expertly, and with a small knife – skinned alive, his face removed. We are in Sydney and the assassin’s name is Daozi, which in Chinese means knife. Jose’s seventh work of fiction traces the sometimes-brittle nature of identity as it plays with an ancient Chinese riddle: ‘Before your father and mother were born, what was your original face?’ It’s a confidently crafted pastiche; a kind of film-noir literature with a tender twist of Buddhist philosophy.