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Writing a matter of hours after Charles Dickens’s death on 9 June 1870, an obituarist for The Times of London remarked, ‘The story of his life is soon told’. The publication of Dickens’s friend John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens between 1871 and 1874 soon gave the lie to these words, revealing a far more complex and damaged Dickens than the reading public had ever suspected this novelist, journalist, actor, social reformer and bon viveur to be. Since the 1870s thousands of pages have been devoted to scrutinising the life of the self-styled ‘sparkler of Albion’, including G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: A critical study (1906), Edgar Johnson’s magisterial Charles Dickens: His tragedy and triumph (1952) and Claire Tomalin’s superbly readable account of Dickens’s infatuation with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, The Invisible Woman (1991).

This is Tom Shapcott’s thirteenth individual collection of poetry (two Selected Poems have appeared, in 1978 and 1989) in a writing life that – at least for his readers – began with the publication of Time on Fire in 1961. It continues something of a late poetic flowering, which, to my critical mind, began with The City of Home in 1995. All in all, Parts of Us is no disgrace to its twelve predecessors.

Southerly and élitism

Dear Editor,

I was pleased to see ABR’s review of the seventieth birthday issue of Southerly (March 2010), but I need to respond to a number of matters raised in Jeffrey Poacher’s review. First, though, I need to own the error pointed out by Mr Poacher. Mr Poacher correctly observes that I twice get wrong the name of the founding editor. The man’s name was R.G. Howarth. I wrote R.J. Howarth. The middle initial was wrong.

The subtle beauty of the title of Sarah Day’s new collection of poetry, Grass Notes, epitomises the lightness of touch and intensity that characterises the poems. This is a collection of observing what might otherwise be seen as slight or glancing, yet that offers powerful prisms of insight. In a Whitmanesque mode, Day’s perspective not only looks up from the grass into the vastness of the world, but also looks at the grass itself, the unexceptional yet foundational ground of all perception and experience. Perhaps as the poet scribbles ‘notes’ in that grass, there is also an echo of Wordsworth and post-romantics such as Judith Wright or Mary Oliver. The title also chimes homophonically with the idea of the musical ‘grace note’, that small, quick, note that runs into the next and, in its delicacy, makes that central sound, or image, both more appealing and more complex. In Day’s work, it is the delicacy of such lateral images, often derived from close consideration of the natural world, that complicates and enriches the ideas at work within the poems.

Let no one say that all travel memoirs fall into the same predictable box. Otherland and Mother Land, two such works from Melbourne writers, may enjoy rhyming titles and pluck similar strings, but their styles could hardly be more dissimilar. The first, a new book from Maria Tumarkin, describes a journey to her Ukrainian/ Russian country of birth with her twelve-year-old daughter in tow; the second, a 2008 evocation by Dmetri Kakmi, follows a revisiting of his childhood on a Turkish-Greek island. Of it I wrote in The Age: ‘Always a beautiful, evocative and carefully crafted reconstruction of a past life generically familiar to many migrants, Mother Land outshines the plethora of similar memoirs because it consciously operates at two levels: the narrow focus, limited characters and humdrum events are transcended and elevated to a universal myth of loss’ (16 August 2008).

At the moment, there are about 5,000 world languages, and ninety per cent of these languages are spoken by about five per cent of the world’s population. A pessimistic forecast would predict that by 2,100 only 500 of these languages will still exist; an optimistic forecast might put the figure at 2,500, about the same rate as the extinction of mammals. Many of the languages under threat are spoken in countries that are close to Australia: Papua New Guinea has 850, Indonesia 670, and India 380. (Australia is listed as still having 200, but many Australian linguists would put this figure much lower.) It is a relatively easy matter to rally the troops, the money and the organisational forces to attempt to save furry mammals; it is a much more difficult matter to rally support to save languages. This book, by the eminent French linguist Claude Hagège, assesses how and why languages die, what the cost of their deaths is, and whether anything can be done to prevent their annihilation.

The federal government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is, above all, an exercise of power. It illustrates for all to see that the government can interfere with the smallest details of domestic life in a blatantly discriminatory way, regardless of Australia’s international obligations and professed belief in racial equality. It declares to the world that adult Aborigines can be treated like children. Both the present and previous government would argue, in a time-honoured way, that it is for the communities’ own good.

Scepticism in the ordinary understanding is a doubting disposition, a healthy questioning mistrustfulness of extravagant or suspect claims to knowledge. Philosophical scepticism incorporates the attitude, but is more comprehensive in its objects. A philosophical sceptic may doubt the possibility of all knowledge, as the ancient Pyrrhonists did, or question our ability to obtain specific but fundamental kinds of knowledge. Early twentieth-century philosophy, for example, was much exercised by sceptical challenges to prove the existence of the ‘external world’ and minds other than one’s own. How do I know that there are other minds when all I ever see are bodies and behaviour? How do I know that there are material objects when all I directly apprehend are subjective sense data or perceptions?

Robert Dessaix and China

During Writers’ Week last month, many of the writers on the program were outraged to learn of the plight of their fellow guest Robert Dessaix. The celebrated author of A Mother’s Disgrace and Arabesques was scheduled to fly to China at the conclusion of Writers’ Week, having been invited by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to take part in Shanghai’s International Literary Festival, along with writers such as Les Murray and Alexis Wright. China then banned Dr Dessaix from entering the country because of his HIV status. Ironically or not (was there a punitive link here, Robert Dessaix wondered in public), he was replacing Frank Moorhouse, who had withdrawn from the festival because of the imprisonment of Chinese writers. Led by Michelle de Kretser and Charlotte Wood, one hundred Australian authors and commentators protested at this offensive and unenlightened decision, as did ABR and the Australian Society of Authors. China’s discriminatory policy was widely criticised, even in China.

Does the title of this anthology, heralded by its editors as the first collection of Australian gay/lesbian/queer poetry, refer to the myth of Pandora’s pithos? Hesiod’s version of the story, which sees Pandora as the unleasher of all manner of evils on the (‘rational’/patriarchal) world, has been interrogated by feminist scholars who see Pandora in an older incarnation of ‘gift-giver’, bestower of plenitude, crosser of boundaries. Or does ‘Out of the Box’ have a more colloquial sense – ‘exceptional’, ‘surprising’? Whatever the reasoning behind the title, Michael Farrell and Jill Jones have made choices which should provoke debate (among other things) about gay and lesbian identity and community, and about the relationship between poet and reader.