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Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collections. ‘Plain-speak’ also has an Orwellian feel, particularly with ‘intelligence’ and ‘educated’. Many poetry conventions and metaphors are aids to communication, including their use in general speech.

There are many competitions for short story writing in Australia but few for reviewing. Indeed the Geraldine Pascall Prize is the only one that comes to mind, which was fust won by Marion Halligan, regular reviewer for The Canberra Times and ABR, and, more recently, was won by Andrew Riemer, lead reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald and regular reviewer for ABR. The Pascall Prize is awarded by a panel of judges who consider the published reviews of candidates, so is awarded for body of work and overall contribution to the reviewing world.

While less is usually more with poetry, there’s no denying the power and even magnificence of longer pieces produced in Australia in recent years by Les Murray, Luke Davies, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter and others. Susan Hampton’s ‘The Kindly Ones’ belongs firmly on this A-list. The title-piece comprises the second half of the book, but the shorter poems that precede it, while standing separately, can be seen as a kind of preface in their concerns. The ‘Kindly Ones’ are the three Furies – Tisiphone, Magaera and Alecto – on holiday from vengeance in contemporary Australia. Tisiphone’s narration is incisive, pacy and always underscored by irony. It is this balance of sentiment and the ironic eye that is a masterful achievement in this and various of the shorter poems. Hampton’s constant juxtaposition of the deeply disturbing and the ordinary also results in irony that ranges from the charming to the razor-edged. Much of this is achieved by her excellent control of voice. Her finely tuned ear for the vernacular sits comfortably next to layers of classical erudition, and exposition on the nature of tragedy – ancient versus modern. Hampton matches her free verse form to content quite effortlessly and Tisiphone is convincing as she seeks her better self. ‘On the Bright Road’, a shorter poem, foreshadows Tisiphone’s quest: ‘The vast erasures of the self / contain somehow in their deep hold / the – I hesitate to call it a god – / the second self, a post-colonial god, / no longer a queen or king but an acting subject / in the realm of subjectivity, where / your best god is met after your worst self.’

I first heard of Martin Boyd at a dinner party in the Cotswolds in the early 1980s. At the time I was adapting a novel by Rosamond Lehmann for the BBC, an enterprise with unexpected hazards, as Rosamond was very much alive and keen to be involved in the process. I had just begun my account of driving to the studio with Rosamond – a formidable and still beautiful woman, who relied on God to solve her parking problems – when the guest of honour, sitting opposite me, interrupted.

Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism sets out to cover the history of feminism in Australia during the period between 1877, when Charlotte Elizabeth McNeilly unsuccessfully petitioned the Sydney court for a divorce from her abusive husband, and now when Helen Osland is currently serving a gaol sentence for the murder of her husband after a married life of brutal abuse.

Judith Rodriguez deserves a guernsey for this book. It’s one of the best collections to appear in a long while. I think it’s more interesting than its companions in the UQP Selected/Collected series which is now three-all with Shapcott, Taylor and Rodriguez standing as our Living Treasures, and Dransfield, Buckmaster and Rankin among those freed from earthly care. Two chaps and one lady in each category, one observes. There must be logic in it? Poets don’t actually have to die before they get notices. But in the case of Buckmaster and Rankin it will push the reputation up a few notches. I know that’s callous, but you want the truth, don’t you?

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.

When Geraldine Brooks went through her father’s possessions after his death, she found the bundles of letters which prompted her to write Foreign Correspondence. Lawrie Brooks had been in the habit of writing to politicians and intellectuals with ideas and questions, and he had kept all their replies. Each letter, Brooks reflects, is ‘a small piece of the mosaic of his restless mind’. Because her father hoarded his past in photographs and newspaper clippings as well as letters, she had the makings of an intimate portrait of a reserved and unhappy man.

In one sense, the publisher’s blurb on this novel says it all.

Just before the publication of her novel Dark Places in 1994, Kate Grenville said that she was thinking about her next book, ‘a heart-warming old-fashioned love story’. Well, The Idea of Perfection – and isn’t that what all love stories are about? – is that love story, though it warms both heart and head, for the bliss it affords is not so much visceral as aesthetic, even architectural.