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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Vortex
Fiction

Vortex by Rodney Hall

The title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole. As a dynamic metaphor for the novel’s wide-ranging vision of history, the title might be interpreted as the opposite of a widening gyre, a repudiation of the terrifying prospect of mere anarchy, an affirmation of the idea that there is a shape (and indeed a gravity) to events that grants them a kind of coherence, though the fact that the ordering centre of a vortex is also the point of annihilation is hardly reassuring.

From the Archive

From the Archive

May 2013, no. 351

News from the Editor's Desk

‘We live in exacting times – or think we do.’ Advances, ever wary of alarmists, was reminded of Peter Steele’s epigram while reading Kerryn Goldsworthy’s article ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, the fruit of her ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship, which we are delighted to be able to publish in this issue.

We are all familiar with facile notions that criticism is dead, or incurably futile; that long-form journalism is a defunct (or miraculously recent) school; that critics themselves are woefully biddable, incestuous creatures. Dr Goldsworthy – a former Editor of ABR – dubs this the ‘decline polemic’. Her article, based on a survey of sixteen leading reviewers and literary editors, examines these anxieties and points to new forms, new freedoms, new opportunities.

There can be no doubt, though, that book reviewing faces many challenges. Miniscule space in some newspapers; no space at all in others; the valorising of online verdicts from anyone who can negotiate a keyboard; sloppy critical practices: these are just some of the hazards that exercise the minds of Dr Goldsworthy’s subjects, and many others.

From the Archive

April 1980, no. 19

Phillip Martin reviews 'The Man in the Honeysuckle' by David Campbell

This book came out last November four months after David Campbell died, and represents (say the publishers) ‘the very last of his poems’.

Although of late I’ve read just about everything he published, there’s no space here to sum up his work. Besides, Geoff Page (ABR October 1979) has already taken a keenly perceptive look at the past ten years development and has also foreshadowed my comments on this last collection. Quite rightly he points to those poets (Lowell, Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa), in whom Campbell found reminders of ‘some­thing he had long had to do’. Their poems, then, were like good parents, teaching their children not to imitate them but to assume their own identities. In The Man in the Honeysuckle, I especially note the influence of Popa: like him, Campbell in many poems cleans away all punctuation and yet the syntax sings clearly, so that we get a new version of the limpid poem we have always expected from Campbell.