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Rarely does an image on a novel’s cover appear exactly as you, the reader, imagine the character to look. But Mae Ruth Perkins, on the elegant scarlet cover of Linda Jaivin’s new novel, definitely does. Bordello eyes, boudoir lips and all: the face in an early 1900s photograph is Mae’s own. The jewellery, faintly visible, is hers too, just as Jaivin describes it: ‘He helped her tie a black ribbon with a silver horseshoe charm around her neck, the open part facing upwards … She asked him to fasten a delicate platinum chain with a vertical triplet of gold hearts around her neck as well.’

Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide has no page numbers and no index, indicating that it is to be read as one. Farrell’s work, like that of the Language poets, draws attention to language itself rather than emphasising content or emotion: that is, language is at least temporarily estranged from meaning. Yet, like most attempted definitions, the same could be said of most poetry. Farrell’s work follows in a line from Mallarmé, some Futurist and Dadaist poets, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and more recent Language poets such as Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman. While another Melbourne ‘experimental’ poet, ΠO, often emphasises through vocal performance the component parts of words, Farrell illustrates this visually, often using some self-imposed constraint that calls for repeating lines and words that, in turn, break up until poems almost bubble into a centrifugal chaos. As in the language of text messaging, abbreviated words are nevertheless usually clear.

‘Urgent things to say’ in the Calibre Prize

The competition was keen, the field unprecedentedly large (almost 200 entries), but after main readings and much discussion Kevin Brophy’s and Jane Goodall’s essays struck the judges of this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay (Gay Bilson, Peter Rose and Rebecca Starford) as being in a class of their own. It was impossible to split them. Both writers share the third Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, and each will receive $5000.

That’s all they have in common, though. It would be difficult to find two more dissimilar essays, a measure of Calibre’s versatility and the diversity of the writers who are drawn to it. Jane Goodall’s theme, like her succinct title (‘Footprints’), has a kind of suaveness and urgency as she explores ideas about ecology and personal responsibility with reference to Kate Grenville, Mrs Aeneas Gunn, Nevil Shute and a sublime short story by Leo Tolstoy.

Kevin Brophy’s fruity title (‘“What’re yer lookin’ at yer fuckin’ dog?”: Violence and Fear in Žižek’s Post-political Neighbourhood’) introduces an amazing tale of domestic mayhem and incivility in present-day inner Melbourne. Kevin Brophy’s tormentors may have been the neighbours from hell, but what a tale it is. To make sense of this five-year drama, Kevin Brophy draws on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his theory that violence – ubiquitous violence, as he sees it – is the very basis of late capitalist ‘post-political’ life.

I am old enough to remember when we called it ‘the Levant’. The eastern Mediterranean, a land where the sun rose, where camels lazed in the shade of palm trees, strewn here and there with baked mud huts and their shadows on the sand. A sleepy land, no trouble to anyone, least of all the Ottoman Sultan, its faraway and hands-off ruler – the sick man of Europe, they called him. I once had in my possession an early twentieth-century photograph that came to my family from Palestine with just such a scene: the square adobe hut, the palm tree, the camel. It has long disappeared, along with any misguided notions I had of the place. ‘Middle East’ conjures up altogether different images: bombed cities, crowded refugee camps, unimaginable suffering and bloodshed – above all, hatred. A hatred that runs so deep, over so many generations, that it is a test of the imagination to envisage its ever abating.

Authenticity is a prized but rare commodity in politics. Few politicians are credited with having it to begin with; it is even more difficult to maintain during a political career. Part of the problem is that when politicians seek to understand and please the amorphous public, they generally turn to pollsters and advisers who end up scripting their words, campaigns and governing strategies. These gurus will even inform them what food is most appropriate (sandwiches with regular mustard, not Dijon, as one of Obama’s aides told him during a visit to a diner in southern Illinois). Public appearances are selected based on voter resonance, though sometimes with jarring results, as with the appearance of then New South Wales premier, the urbane non-motorist Bob Carr, at the opening of a drag-car racing track. Male politicians are told to wear earthy colours to appear more manly. Those who end up on a television debate are advised to keep away the frowns and scowls, even when their opponents twist the truth.

When I was a student, the professor used to say that Australian literature had no intellectual content. That was the way professors spoke back then. He might have had A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson in mind; Paterson was an enormously popular writer, who didn’t let difficult ideas get in the way. Paterson is the sort of writer who goes straight to the sentimental core of his material. He does not chase after profundities or wrestle with conceptual difficulties.

Paterson could not care less about professorial pursed lips and all that. When, in 1895, his first volume, The Man from Snowy River, and Other Poems, was published, it sold out within a week. Paterson was a sensation, both here and abroad. The Times enthused, and Rudyard Kipling, with whom Paterson was immediately compared, congratulated Angus & Robertson, the publishers.

Writing as Eva Sallis, Eva Hornung earned enough prizes and shortlistings to send a reviewer sprinting shame-faced to the nearest library. Fortunately, Joyce Carol Oates, with her inordinately prodigious output, sees no grounds for guilt: ‘Each book is a world unto itself, and must stand alone and it should not matter whether a book is a writer’s first, or tenth, or fiftieth.’ Thus, while a predilection for wild life might be deduced from some of Sallis-Hornung’s previous titles (The City of Sea-lions, 2002, The Marshbirds, 2005) and an Arabic orientation from others (Hiam, 1998, Sheherazade through the Looking Glass, 1999), Dogboy, which is set in Moscow, begs to stand on its own hind legs.

The last thing Marion May Campbell is, is laid back. From the beginning she has been a writer high on etymology, delirious with the possibilities of form and narrative, peculiarly subject to what Genet described as the ‘horizontal vertigo’ of writing. In her novels Lines of Flight (1985), Not Being Miriam (1988), Prowler (1999) and the most recent, Shadow Thief (2006), she has displayed a constitutional aversion to the more sociological approaches to literary art. Realism, in other words, is not for her. More than anything, it is language itself that has been Campbell’s subject.