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This is a distinctive and unsettling voice, one that doesn’t have time for overly polite concessions to our finer feelings. You either keep pace (and it’s compelling) or stand aside as the spadework gets done. Reading this poetry, we are involved in an unearthing of past events and made witness to the laying bare of personal response. But there’s nothing self-indulgent or hollow about Gig Ryan’s disinterment. The poetry has a sometimes shocking immediacy, a curious mixture of fierceness and vulnerability that conveys feeling with integrity.

Set mostly in north-western Nepal during the early 1970s, Blood on the Lotus is a fictionalised account of the events leading up and consequent to the CIA’s withdrawal of support for the Kamphas, the Tibetan guerrilla army fighting the occupying Chinese.

The reasons for rhyme, and the rhyme of his reasons, can be found in the prose work in the pieces ‘Poems and Poesies’ and ‘Poemes and the Mystery of the Embodiment’, the general underpinnings of which are outlined in ‘Embodiment and Incarnation’. He argues that art is a product of a trinity: the forebrain (the seat of waking reason), the limbic reptilian brain (the dream) and the body (the dance of ecstasy). God can reach us through all three, and poetry is a uniquely placed art which exploits all of these areas. Any deep integration of the three is a poem. Hence a theology (Christianity), an ideology (Marxism), or a breath-taking design (Porsche cars) can be a poem. Using the analogy from phoneme, Murray calls this large unit a ‘poeme’. ‘Poem’ he reserves for its traditional meaning, arguing that a poem is the most perfect and integrated art-form there is.

One of the challenges confronting the writer of poetry is the balancing of public and private modes in an engaging and satisfactory whole. In these three collections the precarious possibilities of balance, of confiding and confronting, are attempted in very different ways.

How different can two books be? Peter Rose’s first book, The House of Vitriol, is one of the first off the rank for the new Picador poetry series – and a sign of things to come. It is mercurial where Lehmann is mild. Rose’s style is very distinct: gaudy and revved up from the start.

The Australian Bicentennial Arts Program has been documented in a collection of review articles recently published by Mead and Beckett. It is a record not only of the wide range of arts activities throughout the year but also of some of the issues which confronted the artists involved.

No, it is not an Aborigine on the front of the Australian Bicentennial Authority’s 1988 Reviews (edited by Sarah Overton). It is Mamadou Dioume as Bhima in Brook’s Mahabharata. And don’t be misled by the Aboriginal colours in a contemporary-primitive motif that hovers in the foreground about the title. The essential problem is, evidently, to appear respectable while affirming a vanquished culture (is there a preferable word?) within an imperial medium.

Men are running scared, says David Foster, in the wake of ‘uppity’ women who want to emasculate them. In conversation with him about his new book, Mates of Mars, Rosemary Sorensen contemplates the rules and codes of chivalric fighting.

David is a little defensive as he answers the door to me in Bundanoon, where he lives with Gerda and hordes of children. He’s not too impressed with literary critics, and academics leave him cold. But he knows that there’s a game called publicity and if people are going to find out about his new novel, then he will have to tolerate the prying and jostling of people such as myself. I’d already told him that I think Mates of Mars is outrageously good, but I could see in his face he thought that might have been an angle I was using, a feint, a sly positioning so that I could manoeuvre myself into a perfect position to kick him in the groin. David Foster is very, very wary of women.

I was supercilious towards Italy and Italians before seeing Italian films and reading Curzio Malaparte’s novels. Malaparte foiled the superciliousness while the films’ backgrounds, something as simple as sunlight in the squares, intrigued. Previously France had provided an alternative to Anglo-Saxon culture. An Irish heritage set me askew to Anglo-Saxondom, but it did not give me another language as English had supplanted Gaelic. In any case, Ireland was the past and a somewhat mythic past at that. My parents were attached to Ireland but even their parents had been born in Australia. Indeed there had been no direct contact with Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century; it was the past you could not reach but only romanticise. Being of Irish origin meant being Catholic outside the Anglo-Protestant Pale.

Hero, Allan Baillie’s sixth novel for young readers, shows this seasoned storyteller at his best. Succinct yet incisive, it is a highly disciplined display of how tight technique can turn a single incident into an exciting story. Right from the first line, ‘A single drop of water exploded on Pamela Browning’s open exercise book’, we know we are on the precipice of an event towards which every mumble on the earth and rumble in the sky lead.

Would it surprise you to know that a number of our well-known writers write to please themselves? Probably not. If there’s no pleasure, or challenge, or stimulus, the outcome would probably not be worth the effort. If this effort is writing, it seems especially unlikely that someone would engage in the activity without enjoying the chance to be their own audience.