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Writing this on the first Tuesday in November, I am struck by how different contemporary Australian poetry is from the Melbourne Cup. There is no money in poetry, of course, and in horse racing everyone, even the horses, are much better dressed. What’s more, despite complaints to the contrary, the returns are usually better when it comes to reading poetry than spending your days at the TAB. Martin Duwell’s The Best Australian Poetry 2003 and Peter Craven’s The Best Australian Poems 2003 are dead certs, compared to the boundless unreliability of horses.

In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty, among his various pronouncements to Alice, pontificates on the meanings of names. After describing the name Alice’ as ‘a stupid name enough’, Humpty Dumpty asks her what the name Alice means. Alice is doubtful: ‘Must a name mean something?’ And Humpty Dumpty retorts: ‘Of course it must ... My name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too.’ The question of the meaning of Alice’s name is left unanswered in Lewis Carroll’s text, but it is answered in William Noble’s Names from Here and Far: The New Holland Dictionary of Names. Alice, we are told, is an English form of the name Adelaide, which in turn is a compound from the Germanic words athel, meaning ‘noble’, and Hilda, meaning ‘heroine’, or heid, meaning ‘kind’. Thus Alice means something like ‘nobly born’.

Tackling a ‘worthy’ theme and making a poem or story readable and entertaining is a challenge. There is a fine line between subtlety and didacticism. My Gran’s Different manages, just barely, to stay on the right side. The narrator’s grandmother is different: she has Alzheimer’s, though this is never spelt out. Instead, there is a dual story: one part is the journey of a boy on his way to see Gran; the other is his friends’ grandmothers, who each have their own speciality – footy fan, florist, art gallery owner and so on. At last we discover why Gran is different and understand the special relationship the boy has with her. Children will inevitably ask why Gran ‘can’t remember who she is’. There is an expectation that the adult reading the book will be able to answer this question, because no information is given. Anyone intending to use this as a way to explain an elderly relative’s condition will probably find that it’s only the first step.

On 25 April 1984, 300 people attended the dawn service at Gallipoli. In 2000 there were 15,000, many of them young Australians. In recognition of his renewed interest, Patrick Carlyon (who was at the 2000 service) has written The Gallipoli Story. Looking beyond the well-known Anzac heroes and stories, Carlyon takes us into the trenches and introduces us to individuals: young men with names and hometowns, with sisters and girlfriends; young men who are afraid and confused. The shocking waste of life, as soldiers from both sides charge to their deaths, can make for uncomfortable reading, but Carlyon has refrained from gratuitous violence. It is one thing to have hundreds of dry facts and statistics at hand, quite another to weave these facts into an engaging story. Carlyon has managed it superbly.

Much young adult fiction is about not fitting in. How that topic is covered distinguishes the hack from the frustrated pedant and the gifted writer. This review covers eight YA novels by skilful writers whose diverse works are peopled by those who refuse to fit the norm.

Rupert Murdoch certainly attracts a good class of biographer. There was George Munster, who contributed so much to Australian politics and culture by helping to establish and edit Nation, and William Shawcross, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists. There were other biographies, too, before the efforts of Bruce Page ...

Anyone who heard Inga Clendinnen’s 1999 Boyer Lectures or who has listened to her in any other way will hear her voice clearly in this book: contemplative, reflective, warm, gently paced. Dancing with Strangers seems to have been written as if it were meant to be read aloud. It reaches out to its listeners ...

The first edition of David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language appeared in 1995, and was widely acclaimed. It covered an extraordinary amount of material under the broad topics of ‘The History of English’, ‘English Vocabulary’, ‘English Grammar’, ‘Spoken and Written English’, ‘Using English’ and ‘Learning about English’. It used modern design techniques and was richly illustrated with all kinds of visual material. It was a book that allowed extended reading of essays on particular topics, or dipping and pursuing cross-references. This second edition appears eight years later. Has English changed sufficiently in those eight years to justify a new edition? Is there enough new material in this new edition to persuade someone who bought the first edition in 1995 to buy the 2003 one?

A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –

Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;

a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap

closes another deluded seeker of asylum

behind barbed wire; civil liberties

are spooked by terror; girl children

trafficked to sexual servitude –

and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,

the great-grandmother of my children

dead in another camp, another winter, another story,

can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –

although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart

is dry as yesterday’s crusts.

One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.