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An unnamed visitor and note taker wanders present day Paris in Antoni Jach’s new novel, researching something about the city’s ‘many layers’. This amorphous and arduous quest brings him to a certain library where, while he is waiting for a book on aboveground Paris to be retrieved, a spirited American woman tries to draw him out on his work and why he’s in Paris. He airily responds that his interest lies not only in the city’s underground layers but ‘the buildings and the ether’. He’s remote and strangely earnest yet she’s keen to meet him again, whereas he ‘feels like a barbarian’ in her company and is too neurotically preoccupied with some other kind of engage­ment, an exchange with history, to flirt.

Despite the differences in style, careful logic seems to me to be the prevalent characteristic of both these accomplished poetry collections. Hard-won logic, too. In each, we are made aware often of the processes of achieving intellectual and emotional assessment and balance. As the titles indicate, poem after poem vividly accumulates details to settle on a succinct but more distanced and distancing overview.

In November 1998, the Governor General, Sir William Deane, found himself in the centre of a storm over the commemoration of Australia’s Aboriginal dead. Launching historian Ken Inglis’s Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Sir William remarked that in a country of more than 4,000 memorials there were none, at least of an official kind, to the Aborigines who had been slaughtered in the ‘Black Wars’ of the colonial period.

In the hierarchy of celebrity, there is one group of people constantly referred to with a casual, first-name intimacy. The ‘I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day’ brigade, the supermodels. Linda and Naomi, Christy and Kate. It’s not that we know anything about them as individuals, nor that they seem any more approachable than any other kind of late twentieth century celebrity. It’s the brand-name simplicity of their fame , the instantly recognisable qualities they incarnate. Recognisable at a glance, they are trademarks, bestowing their signature style on garments, products, publications, and boyfriends.

What do women want and how can they get it? These questions were at the heart of second wave feminism. The Women’s Power Handbook focuses on the second of these queries. The idea for the book was born when Moira Rayner and Joan Kirner met touring Victoria with Naomi Wolfe. On their travels they were struck by the questions that young women asked. Most of these related to practical issues about power. How to get it and, more important, how to use it without compromising integrity. According to the authors, no feminist tracts were providing young women with the answers that they needed, and this is what they set out to do in The Women’s Power Handbook.

As with the dozen or so collections of Geoff Page’s poetry that have preceded it over almost thirty years, Collateral Damage can be opened at random with the certainty that something impressive will be there. One of the most striking characteristics of his published work is its consistent high quality.

On a day which began with Eve finding her children ‘half naked and purple with cold … crying on their bed’, she was visited by a detective. He was there to ask questions because ‘La Gauss’, the old woman who let rooms to the family, had accused Eve’s husband of stealing. Langley let him know that she wrote everything down, including all of La Gauss’s lies, and that she would one day make a book of it. He is surprised that she could write of her life in these parts, and waves ‘his hand toward the ferns and gorse on the hill outside’. Eve replied, ‘The tragedy of life down here would amaze you. I have everything down sympathetically, and someday it shall be published.’

Rosalie Fraser, a two-year-old Aboriginal child, is taken from her family by Child Welfare authorities and fostered with a distant relation of her non-Aboriginal father. She suffers years of abuse at the hands of her foster mother. Occasionally she runs away but her foster mother is always able to charm her into returning. She finally leaves for good when she meets a young man named Stan whom she later marries. In her mid-twenties a gynaecological operation which becomes unexpectedly complicated and painful causes flashbacks of the abuse she endured as a child and she realises she has to confront her past. She writes Shadow Child and in conclusion recommends writing as a therapy for anyone ‘who has problems to come to terms with’.

I wouldn’t have minded being a fly on the wall when Valerie Wilson did the research for this book. It began life as a PhD project in the University of Melbourne’s Business School. Wilson wanted to find out what underlying attitude people had to money. She should have asked me. I love the stuff. Just don’t see enough of it.

For a reviewer, there’s always a temptation to seek a link when writing about more than one book at a time. In this instance, the link, if there is one, is that both these novels for young adults attempt to recreate other worlds, albeit in one case an imagined one, in the other a ‘real’ one. In other respects, however, they could hardly be more different. One credits its readers with intelligence and stamina, the other condescends to them.