One of Australia’s most successful tenors and in his ninetieth year, Thomas Edmonds has put pen to paper in what might be his swansong. Ev’ry Valley: A tenor’s journey is a prodigiously detailed account of his life, and quite a marvel for what it contains. All his memories and ruminations are contained in its 313 pages, and the book is arranged in a most unusual way: by abode. A singer’s life is on the road, one might say, and this has surely been the case with Edmond. No less than thirty addresses are the subject of each of its chapters, starting in rural South Australia where he grew up, expanding geographically as he went on to win a talent quest television program in the 1960s, and reaching further career heights in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.

On a Tuesday morning in April 1954, Australians awoke to sensational headlines. The wife of Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov, who had recently sought asylum in Australia, was dragged aboard an aircraft in Sydney, as an impassioned, noisy crowd of a thousand tried to prevent her departure. Whether you were a dock worker or a stockbroker, your morning newspaper carried some version of what has become the Petrov Affair’s most iconic image: Evdokia Petrova, shoeless and eyes streaming, flanked by two bulky Soviet couriers, marching her across the tarmac. By all appearances, a terrified Russian woman was dragged, unwillingly, towards a dire fate in the Soviet Union.

Colm Tóibín has that special distinction among contemporary writers of being both a first-rate novelist and an acutely discerning critic. In recent years, as well as publishing some magnificent novels, among them Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014), and Long Island (2024), he has written searching critical studies of other writers, including Elizabeth Bishop (2015). His latest critical work, On James Baldwin, was published in 2024 to coincide with the centenary of Baldwin’s birth. It grew out of the Mandel Lectures in the Humanities that Tóibín delivered at Brandeis University, but it also draws on a long and passionate engagement with Baldwin’s work, including an essay on Baldwin and Barack Obama published in the New York Review of Books in 2008.

The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.

I write this review over the Australia Day long weekend, a few items from the national media stand out as exemplary reminders of how poorly Australians are being served by our political class. First, in an embarrassingly transparent nod to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s juvenile Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Opposition Leader Peter Dutton appointed Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the new shadow ministry for government efficiency. Second, Dutton’s deputy Sussan Ley likened the First Fleet’s 1788 arrival in Australia to Musk’s delusional fantasies about occupying Mars. ‘Just like astronauts arriving on Mars,’ she told an Albury church congregation, ‘those first settlers would be confronted with a different and strange world, full of danger, adventure and potential.’ Around the globe, many are increasingly wary of the political trajectory of the United States in its current phase of advanced decadence, but for Australia’s alternative government, now is the time to cling to the sinking ship that is the American empire.

It is worth noting that Jennifer Maiden, along with the present reviewer, seems to be one of the few Australian poets born in the 1940s who is still writing. Each of us has to be careful now (as Peter Goldsworthy wrote long ago) that we are not ‘Carving this same face / out of soap, each morning / slightly less perfectly’.

In his brief Foreword to H.D.’s posthumous collection, Hermetic Definition (1974), Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75) provides an authoritatively crystalline summary of the poet’s life’s work. Asserting the primacy of her later poetry, the ‘war trilogy’ (1942-44) and Helen in Egypt (1961), Pearson recovers H.D. from her accepted but ‘inadequate’ typecasting as an Imagist, identifying her deployment of Freud as ‘a great mythologist’ in her highly personal engagement with hermetic and kabbalistic sources.

Caro Llewellyn is the author of four works of non-fiction, including her Stella Prize-shortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass (2019).  For more than three decades, she has worked with writers variously in publishing and as a festival director and human rights advocate in Australia, France, and the United States, where she lives. Love Unedited, her first novel, is published this month.

In his 2015 study of Joseph Stalin, historian Stephen Kotkin suggested that the Bolshevik revolution could have been stopped by just two bullets: one aimed at Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, hiding across the border in Finland but pressing the Bolshevik Party to seize power; a second bullet for Leon Trotsky, on the ground in Petrograd as a determined band of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers stormed the Winter Palace.