David McCooey

Autobiography is based on a paradox. It is a generic representation of identity, but identity and genre appear to be antithetical. If we conventionally think of our identity as unique (singular, autonomous and self-made), how then can the presentation of that identity be generic? How, when narrating our lives, can we be both singular and understandable? Does narrating a life presuppose a way of writing (that is, a genre) that will make it recognisable as a story of a life? And how individual can we be, given that we are social animals? We live in families, form attachments and belong to institutions. How much is identity a case of identifying with others?

Having taught literary studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Adrian Caesar is perhaps better placed than most to understand the troubled relationship between power and culture, order and creativity. ‘All Cock Red’, one of the poems in Caesar’s fourth book of poems, High Wire, attends to such a context:

To celebrate the best books of 2005 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Morag Fraser, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

Comedy isn’t the only art that requires good timing. Poetry also requires it. Indeed, poetry might be partly defined as the art of giving things away at the right moment. Illustrating this we have The Best Australian Poetry 2005. In this elegant anthology, we find Peter Goldsworthy’s inspired description of our planet: ‘Our earthen dish is seven parts water / one part china, and a tiny bit japanned.’ We also find Brett Dionysius on the 175-year-old tortoise Harriet, which, having outlived Charles Darwin, thinks: ‘Now I’m with Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo. / I Harriet, time-lord tortoise: outlive him too.’ We find Jennifer Harrison’s arresting description of ‘grammar’s lovely utterly cold snow’. We find Keith Harrison’s ‘kind of stretched villanelle’ (as he describes it), which begins: ‘The summer night is dangerous and deep.’ We find the unsettling climax of Aileen Kelly’s ‘His Visitors’, in which ‘fetid ivies’ ‘reach up and suck out the light’. We find Anthony Lawrence’s poem about the Wandering Albatross, with its reference to ‘the compass glass of its eye’. And we find the terrible, uncomic climax of Judith Beveridge’s powerful poem ‘The Shark’.

A laughing man, according to Flaubert, is stronger than a suffering one. But as Craig Sherborne’s extraordinary new memoir of childhood and youth shows, the distinction isn’t that simple. There is much to laugh at in Hoi Polloi, but this is also a book suffused with pain and suffering ... 

If I hesitate to declare delight in Blister Pack, David McCooey’s first volume of poetry, it may be because McCooey himself casts a shadow over the word in ‘Succadaneum’, a sequence of sardonically sad glimpses of the failed love that constitutes the theme of Part II of this collection – ‘Delight, it turns out, / is a lawyer / staying back at work / kicking off her shoes / and opening a bottle of red’, abandoning clients’ disasters to files ‘locked / in metal cabinets’.

John Tranter once remarked of his online journal, Jacket, ‘I’d guess that about half the readers have no real idea [it] comes from Australia. And I don’t feel it does. It comes from the Internet; it’s almost an outer-space thing.’ In fact, Jacket seems to come from the far more intimate and sociable realm of poets talking to each other. And the talk is endless.

In this special anniversary issue of the North American journal Verse, sub-titled The Second Decade, one can find a poem by Ethan Paquin called ‘New Form’. Its first line reads: ‘Ablution when stitched with pertussitine hate.’ Pertussitine? One of the most striking things about this large, impressive collection of contemporary poetry is its penchant, indeed rage, for the obscure word. After a while, I just left the Shorter Oxford next to me when I was reading, but it didn’t always help when I came across words like ‘usufruct’, ‘blisson’, ‘eldritch’, ‘rutabagas’ (North American for ‘swedes’), ‘alginate’, ‘geode’, ‘arroyos’, ‘aretes’ (those last four from one poem), ‘catafalque’, ‘cartouche’, ‘penetralia’, ‘solatium’, ‘griffonage’, ‘exogamous’, ‘matutinal’ and (twice) ‘pled’ (the past participle of ‘plead’). It’s a mildly interesting parlour game to see which words my computer recognises.

As the late Susan Sontag noted, interpretation tends to fall into two opposing camps. The first kind, ‘aggressive and impious’, treats works of art as landscapes concealing mineral ore: it ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys’. The other, by contrast, resembles less the pit-worker than the more distractible traveller who, so thrilled by the picturesque surrounds, decides to remain awhile: it ‘see[s] more, to hear more, to feel more’. These critical tendencies are still at war, forty years on. In a nutshell, this is the contestation between academic and journalistic writing. Australia’s interdisciplinary periodicals are the ambulances – and the ambulance-chasers – scrambling back and forth across its frontline.

To celebrate the best books of 2004 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors included Dennis Altman, Brenda Niall, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Morag Fraser and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.