Archive

Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the disintegration and demise of the Soviet Empire a decade later, and the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 have all heightened interest in ‘understanding’ Islam in the West. The Iranian Revolution was very much a revolution of the ‘countryside’ against the glitter, domination and corrupt politics of the ‘metropolis’. Its success created an enormous interest in Islam. For the West, the demise of the USSR was more than the demise of what Ronald Reagan had dubbed an ‘Evil Empire’; it removed the ‘enemy’ whose containment had dominated the politics of the Cold War in the US and its European allies. Its historical significance was described by the American political scientist Francis Fukayama in his influential essay ‘The End of History’. The search was on for the enemies of international capitalism and liberal democracy. A few years later, in an equally influential and widely read work, The Clash of Civilizations (1993), Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington identified Islam as one of the potential enemies of Western civilisation.

Oh, happy days indeed. These are good times for readers and perhaps not so bad for writers either, as Griffith Review joins Meanjin and Heat in publishing work that might otherwise struggle to reach us. That such thoughtful and sometimes excellent writing should often be rewarded with risible rates of pay is less satisfactory, but it was ever thus, apart from the pennies from heaven offered so briefly, and controversially, by the conjunction of the Australia Council for the Arts and The Australian. The Council helps keep Meanjin and Heat afloat, and for this we should all be grateful. Griffith Review, however, is the result of a collaboration between the university and ABC Books, which is perhaps why, unlike the other two, it includes a subscription offer with the usual earnest blandishments of so-called highbrow journals (‘celebrates good writing and promotes public debate’). Still, judging by its second issue, Dreams of Land, no one could dispute the former claim, and, with the latter building up steam. the Griffith Review looks set to brighten our days for the foreseeable.

Dark River is John Jenkins’s fourteenth collection of poetry (including the six volumes he has produced with Ken Bolton) and a welcome addition to his oeuvre. This new solo collection contains the wit, language play and urbane imagery we are used to from Jenkins, as well as emotional depth and an infectious delight in language. Demonstrating this are the touching love poem ‘Why I Like You’ and three key elegies, or ‘dedicatory’ poems. The first of these, ‘Long Black’, dedicated to John Anderson, opens the book. This fine poem captures Anderson’s philosophy and his way with light and landscape. Anderson, a shy poet who died at the age of forty-nine without troubling The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, left behind three books whose cadences and unique way of writing about nature and its interconnectedness are still held in great esteem by those who are aware of his work, mainly other Australian poets. In ‘Long Black’, Jenkins (who accompanied Anderson on bushwalks) speaks to his departed companion, reiterating and questioning some of Anderson’s philosophy:

I watch the long black drink
turn in my hands. You say that
where you come from is where
you go to. You say the nothing in
everything is just nothing again.
Air fills the winter trees, but their
cold leaves can’t bring you back.