Review

How many books should an author have under their belt before they indulge in a piece of frippery? When John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley (1962), about his journeys across the country with his poodle, it must have been hard not to see it as a comedown from The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Adding the subtitle (‘In Search of America’) can’t have been enough to convince anyone that this was anything more than a writer who knew he was nearing the end of his life and career, going for a drive with his dog. By then, however, Steinbeck was widely regarded as having earned a certain licence.

This sixth poetry collection by Barry Hill is a fine, intense book of journeying and returns. Poems are based on pilgrimages made in the flesh (to Carrara, to Assisi, to Kyoto) and on those made in the mind as we visit works of art. But there is nothing blandly celebratory about these pilgrimages: the focus is always on the self of the journeyer. Indeed, at a deeper level, its poems are really about the experience of becoming, of being ‘drawn’. And one of the book’s central metaphors is the way there is a double process going on in the creation of the self: we emerge as human beings out of inchoate experience in the way that a sculpture emerges from stone; and, at the same time, we are shaped by the loved ones who surround us.

On page sixty-two of Ann Blainey’s thoroughly researched, excellently written and beguilingly human biography of Nellie Melba there occurs a transition that is simple but that defines, in an instant, the moment the singer went from learner to legend. It happens when the young singer, under the wing of Madame Marchesi (née Mathilda Graumann; nickname ‘the Prussian drill-master’), is ready to make her public European début and requires a new surname. ‘Armstrong’ had to go; in its place, there had to be something ‘distinctive and memorable’:

In early 1980, Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin undertook yet another concert tour. One of their last concerts together was in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There was a dismal yellow standard lamp for light and a revolving stage so that all the patrons could get value for money. The master of ceremonies introduced them as ‘Ham-erica’s own ... Yoohoo and Heffi Menhoon’. These exceptional siblings had been playing music together since 1932, usually in more salubrious venues. Yehudi often spoke of their liaison spirituelle and their ‘Siamese soul’. Their first public concert took place in 1934, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. By 1980 it had become one of the longest and richest partnerships in the history of chamber music.

David Malouf’s Typewriter Music (2007) recently reminded readers that Malouf is a masterful poet. It was also evidence of an especially successful period in Malouf’s glittering career, appearing only a year after the highly praised collection of short stories, Every Move You Make (2006), and in the same year as The Complete Stories (2007). Now with the publication of Malouf’s latest Selected Poems, Revolving Days, we can see that this late efflorescence of poetry and short fiction suggests what might have been evident all along: that Malouf works best within a small frame. Malouf, who began as a poet in the 1960s, has – despite some flirtation with the epic mode – consistently shown himself to be interested in compact forms: the lyric poem, the short story, the essay, the libretto, and the novella.

Roma Mitchell came first in nearly everything. Not only at school and university, but in becoming Australia’s first female OC, Supreme Court judge, Boyer Lecturer, university chancellor and state gover­nor. But she had no inside track to success. Her father was killed in World War I, her mother survived on his pension and the generosity of friends, and Roma and her older sister were taught by the Sisters of Mercy for nothing.

Ocean Road ruminates on the abrupt demise of a marriage. Narrated by the only child of the union, the account is detailed and poignant. Toby, now a young adult, attempts to settle his parents’ competing claims to his allegiance, and finds himself drawn into the world of their past. Striving to represent his parents impartially, he realises that much of their story is also his. The few years since the collapse of the marriage have brought Toby independence as well as the chance, if not the need, to revisit the events that propelled him into adulthood.

Kevin Gillam is director of music at Christ Church Grammar School, in Western Australia. The musician’s lexicon and mindset permeate Permitted to Fall, revealing a life lived through music, as in ‘Not Clockless’: ‘as a kid, from the back / seat, power lines were staves, sky unplayed.’ The acts of playing and performing music also feature thematically, as in the narrative poem ‘The Possibility of Silence’, in which the protagonist finds consolation and catharsis in the act of playing an instrument: ‘she wanted to be a musician, / took up the cello for its tactility, / warmth, its lacquered song.’ If music is often audible behind the poetry, then silence also features prominently. The book’s opening poem, ‘Veldt’, begins, ‘there are times when silence / is very very loud’. It is a weak start to a poem that builds to its own crescendo of sorts. In ‘Harbour’, music is the antidote to silence: ‘music answering the / silence of the stars.’

In the years before steamships gained supremacy of the oceans, sailing ships became faster and were able, for two decades, to outrun the primitive new technology. This book concentrates on the clippers built in North America and used on the run from Liverpool to Melbourne during this period.