University of Queensland Press

I lament hearing the late poet Dorothy Porter (1954–2008) read in public only once, having devoured her work voraciously over the years. In the National Portrait Gallery, I once came across Rick Amor’s smallish 2002 portrait of Porter, which shows candid brown eyes framed by hawkish eyebrows inherited from her renowned barrister father, Chester Porter. ‘Chester Porter walks on water’ was her father’s vainglorious self-descriptor when he wasn’t monikered as ‘The Smiling Funnel-web’ at the bar (see Chester Porter, Walking On Water: A life in the law, 2003).

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

Journalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several business-focused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020).

Kári Gíslason’s memoir of escape and adventure during his early adulthood begins in transit: he is freshly eighteen, ‘sleeping on the floor next to hot air vents at the back of a grand old ferry that connected Brindisi in the heel of Italy with Athens’. Kári is travelling with an ‘often-jolly, sometimes sarcastic’ Scotsman named Paul, and their relationship has begun to fray. Worse, they are low on money, which means their travels and ‘freedom’ may soon be over. Gíslason notes: ‘We were unemployable. I was sickly thin, and my hair past my shoulders and knotted. Paul always looked like he’d just woken up.’ Both are searching for ways to forget their troubles and orient themselves as they take the first steps into manhood, but the pressures that come with such a task have left them feeling oppressed and alienated.

In his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.

Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

There are few places more restful than a riverbank on a fine day, few sights more enticing than a disappearing river bend, few places more intriguing to follow than the tumbled rocks of a creek line. Following the water, to its source or destination, seems hard-wired into our psyche.

In Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Joseph Acquisto borrows a definition of poetry from Phillipe Jaccottet: ‘that key that you must always keep on losing’. Attempting to know its subject, poetry reveals that there is always more to know. But the French poet’s metaphor, for Acquisto, does not mean ‘simple contingency’. It suggests ‘a complex play of certainty and doubt … that actively resists coming to a conclusion’. We might say that poetry expresses the friction in human experience between time and permanence.

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the sailor Charles Marlow recalls captaining a river steamer in the Belgian Congo, a venture that becomes a search for the colonial agent Kurtz, said to be a brilliant if infamous ivory trader, who is ill and possibly mad. Marlow’s journey, of course, becomes a passage into psychological as well as (to the European mind) geographical darkness, and offers a damning portrait of Western imperialism.