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Judith Beveridge is one of the most brilliant image-makers in Australian poetry. She writes of rain ‘bubble-wrapping the windows’ and yachts making a sound ‘as if cutlery were being replenished on table tops’. Her images, exuberant and fantastical, hold a balance between the real and the imagined world – as Gwen Harwood’s poem, ‘Thought Is Surrounded by a Halo’, closes: ‘Picture two lovers side by side / who sleep and dream and wake to hold / the real and the imagined world, / body by body, word by word …’

In life and in literature, Peter Carey has been as attracted by the pull of the past as by realities of the present. Then there is his recurrent fascination with the two-country divide, where the lure of exile vies with the sentiment of ‘home’, and the schism between country of choice (or country that ‘chooses’ you) and country of birth means that neither is ever fully suitable.

Painter Dmitri Pangalidis stares out over the baking Sydney rooftops as he waits for his partner, Choosy McBride, to come home from the gallery where she works as a curator. The city is besieged by heat and Pangalidis spends his day lounging on the couch, trying to motivate himself. The first five pages of The Silence contain no dialogue, with Pangalidis wasting yet another day at home, frustrated and filled with doubt about his art. These scenes are interspersed with those of McBride’s arduous return to the apartment across the city. Once the characters do speak, Bruce Mutard’s stark, contemplative meditation on art and beauty sets an unsettling tone that is maintained throughout.

George Alexander’s new novel opens with a racially motivated murder, committed on Australia Day, 1998. A gang called the Cleaners abducts and executes Sly Bone, an Aborigine, whose body they dump in country New South Wales. We then jump forward a year. Australia Day looms, and the Cleaners have another target in mind. Meanwhile, journalist Alex Tolman and his colleague Larry Sheridan, investigating the crime, anticipate more violence.

Andrew Taylor’s latest book reprises themes common to many of his earlier poetry collections – movement between the antipodes and Europe; the natural landscape; affinities with music – but also, as the title suggests, themes of haunting and unhaunting, visitation and absence. Taylor was ill with cancer in 2003, and his confrontation with death has strongly informed The Unhaunting. The book is divided into five sections, and while the trajectory is far from linear, a sense of moving from darkness to light, from threat to release, unfolds.

The premise of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar is inherently problematic. When your young narrator admits to being a compulsive liar, the whole narrative threatens to degenerate into a fail-safe ending – it was all just a dream! Substitute ‘lie’ for ‘dream’. Thankfully, Micah Wilkins’s narration is so seductive that readers will find themselves devouring this book in an attempt to piece together the promised, if illusive, truth. Besides, this time Micah promises to tell us the whole truth, and why would she lie to us? That truth revolves around the death of Micah’s boyfriend, Zach. Or was it murder? For that matter, were they even dating, and did she see him the night of his death? Questions pile up alongside the lies, distracting us from the fact that sometimes the worst lies are those of omission.

That Homer Rieth is one of the finest lyric poets writing in Australia was apparent with the publication in 2001 of his collection The Dining Car Scene. Now, with Wimmera, his lyric strengths are displayed in epic form. Presented in twelve books and 374 pages, initially titled ‘A Locale of the Cosmos’, grand in conception and impressively detailed in execution, this is a significant achievement indeed, and a major contribution to Australian literature.

In her editorial for Griffith Review 26, Julianne Schultz argues that ‘the best Australian writing has always had a cosmopolitan edge, grounded yet engaged with the world …’ This argument is supported by the contributions to this issue, which are penned by a number of well-known and up-and-coming Australian writers. 

‘You can say a lot more in fiction than you can say in the paper,’ Caroline Overington, journalist and author of two non-fiction books, has remarked of her decision to write a novel. In Ghost Child, she uses this extra scope to consider difficult questions often overlooked in the fast-moving news cycle.

Writing about music, it is frequently said, is in a parlous state, with ever-falling word counts contributing to the dumbing down of the genre. A publication such as Extempore, focusing on Australian jazz, should be well placed to step into the breach, but its second issue struggles to assert its importance.