Jill Jones

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.

This is a song of the white.
The multitude or the pattern.
The rose or the wind.
A woman who begins,
a woman who disappears.
a woman drinking blossom’s shadow.

Broken/Open, Jill Jones’s fifth book of poems, explores the meanings of breaking and opening partly through an exploration of memories where the past is more accessible than the unexpected shocks of the present. Jones’s previous book, Screens Jets Heaven: New and Selected Poems (winner of the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize), contained many poems that hinted at abstraction. Broken/Open, divided into eight sections, furthers that abstraction. Journeying through sites of childhood and memory, the book’s forays into the past open out the present, particularly in the last epiphanic section. Unlike in some earlier work, where social and political comment were overt, opinions are often relegated to phrases to make context for the main drama, although one poem mirrors the plight of asylum seekers with its rudimentary finish: ‘Because I don’t belong here – being from the State of Flux – my / papers do not rhyme … // Because I don’t belong here, I know it is better and I know it is / worse’ (‘Refrains on Sand’).

You’ve heard this story before –
becoming unravelled in Europe
or assaulted in some roadhouse
but bold as nipples and booted.
Recovering with bourbon and red wine
in a soft room with a German
dissolving somehow at right angles
and falling off the frequent flyers list.

Not another novel about heroin, you might ask. You might as well say, not another novel about addiction to anything, including love or death. Luke Davies’ novel risks being seen to jump on the bandwagon of relevance, or grunge, or whatever turns you off. But this a good book, a true book, which left me feeling sad for some days, not a bad thing in these times of numbing busyness in which many of us seem to be trapped.

From Paul Salzman

Dear Editor,

It is a shame that allegations of plagiarism in The Hand That Signed The Paper were trivialised into questions of literary echoes that would certainly not have worried any serious member of that curious entity, the literary community. As someone deeply troubled by the anti-Semitism manifested in the novel, I have been interested to know where the Ukrainian material that ‘Demidenko’ defended as family history may have come from. Perhaps we will never know, but now it seems that the plagiarism issue was really something of a red herring, distracting attention from what was most disturbing about the novel and its attendant prizes. I cannot see that ‘postmodemism’, under any definition, could be blamed for this situation, given that the Miles Franklin judgment is based, I believe, on a bankrupt and outmoded humanism that sees abstract moral truth in literary works without having any sophisticated regard for politics or history.