Archive

Mid-career reinvention is an exciting thing. Ken Bolton’s poem ‘Outdoor Pig-Keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Farming Pigs’, in Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2009, was the most surprising poem in the book. Where were the friends, artists and cafés? Where were the small ironies? A larger irony was at work. Bolton’s new book, The Circus, is something else again: a wry, sly and affectionate long poem nothing like Frank O’Hara – generally seen as Bolton’s guiding influence – and not much like Bolton’s Australian peers either. While much of Bolton’s poetry relies on a bemused first-person narration, relentlessly questioning what a poem or even a thought can do, The Circus is narrated in a shifting third person. It makes quite a difference.

It is strangely affecting to see people’s lips moving as they sit silently reading to themselves. Apparently, when we read we can’t help but imagine speaking. Even silent reading has its life in the body: seeing words, the part of our brain that governs speech starts working. When we read poetry silently to ourselves, is it our own voice or the poet’s voice that we hear?

The key theme of Overland 198 is upheaval. The contributors explore a range of dramatic changes that have occurred in Australian politics and global culture in recent years. Mungo McCallum contends that asylum seekers have been used as political footballs by both Labor and the Liberals. Raewyn Connell investigates how the left has been affected by what she terms the ‘neoliberal agenda’. Michael Brull responds to a recent debate between ‘dissident Jews’ Dennis Altman and Ned Curthoys. James Ley describes the work of up-and-coming Australian novelists, and there is short fiction by Miriam Sved, Phillip Tang and Tim Richards.

The first volume of  T.S. Eliot’s letters, published in 1988, covered his early life to the end of literary modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922. The year was a turning point in the thirty-four-year-old Eliot’s career. In November he published the poem that made him famous, ‘The Waste Land’, in the inaugural edition of Criterion, the journal he was to edit until 1939.

Creative Lives presents short biographical essays on twenty-two Australian writers (two of whom are also notable artists); but it is just as much a book about the value and purpose of the National Library of Australia’s Manuscripts Collection. Ironically, the book offers little documentation of the process by which it came to be written. Hanley does tell us, however, that she ‘was asked to write a book on twenty of the writers whose papers are held in the Manuscripts Collection’ and eventually chose twenty-two.

A generation of Australian schoolchildren knows Peter Skrzynecki’s poetry. The simple, direct language of Immigrant Chronicle (1975) speaks of both the desolation and optimism of the postwar migrant. Boys of Summer, Skrzynecki’s third venture into book-length fiction, treads similar thematic terrain.

The cover-blurb is a genre all its own. No sensible publisher would grace the cover of a book with the assertion, ‘This is a pile of crap’, even if it is. So we should all take a blurb cum granum salis. The blurb for John Dale’s Leaving Suzie Pye reads: ‘Rips along with verve and confidence … funny, energetic and full of life.’ The signatory is Helen Garner. Can this be the same Helen Garner who gave us The Children’s Bach and The First Stone, I asked myself, as I persevered with Dale’s lacklustre novel. What significant omissions are concealed behind those three periods in her remark?

Do not be misled by the ‘Childhood Memories’ of the subtitle. Self-indulgent nostalgia is nowhere to be found in this book, which is a richly novelistic saga of a war-time family in Britain. It is Rodney Hall’s genius that his story evokes strong personal memories in the mind of the reader: in my case of a North Queensland childhood during the 1950s, punctuated by destructive cyclones and deadly marine stingers, rather than by German air raids. To read this book is a double pleasure: we enter both the world of young Rod and our own childhood at the same time.

   ‘It’s something like learning geography,’ thought
       Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able
       to see a little further.
                   Through the Looking-Glass

Our mob was fond of Tweedledee
Because it was cutely seen
That he would rustle up the tribes
And thump the old Red Queen.

A Norwegian giant stands astride the deck of a whaling ship trapped in the Arctic ice, watching the other vessels in the fleet burn. Axe in hand, he patiently awaits the arrival of some disgruntled Eskimos, whom he expects to have to fight. Plagued by visions of a lost love, the Norseman commits the tale of his violent life to paper. One hundred and forty years later, a gaunt, dishevelled man climbs into Farrell’s taxi. He carries with him a box containing an ancient woman’s head, a dildo carved from whalebone and the journal of Ole Olavssen, the Norseman. The decrepit man, Bob Kilmartin, instructs Farrell to drive. Despite having just been beaten up by a transvestite colleague on Collins Street, Farrell obliges, desperate for the fare.