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Chris Wallace-Crabbe has always had a good ear for a title, but Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw is surely his best. Half a century older than Shakespeare’s ghost-ridden poet–hero, he rings the changes on Hamlet’s high-fantastical play with language, by turns delighting and disconcerting an audience which might sometimes struggle to keep up with his leaps and ellipses. Ghosts and shadows abound in this distillation of his finest work from the last five years or so, but the intimations of mortality don’t mean that this book inhabits a Yeatsian ‘country for old men’. There are some curtains of Celtic darkness, but the soul of this poet–singer rejects tattered coats and sticks, swaggering, as the introductory poem has it, ‘On the Side of Life, / suntanned here in the lost antipodes / of childhood’s yellow beach and glaucous water’.

As he stepped down from the podium at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was unhappy. The speech was short and finished abruptly. The crowd was slow to clap. Lincoln turned to friend and occasional bodyguard Ward Lamon. ‘That speech won’t scour,’ he told Lamon. ‘It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.’

‘I like sad girls,’ confesses the creepy narrator of ‘His Blue Period’, the story by Deborah Robertson that opens the latest anthology of short fiction from Black Inc. It is never entirely clear what form this liking took. The narrator’s intentions were undoubtedly sexual, but not just that. What he seemed to desire most of all was the story of each girl’s sadness – the telling of her particular tale of woe, ‘the full, heavy, sad, sweet works’ which blossomed (at least in his mind) like a magnolia. And how did he elicit such revelation? Simply by asking each of his melancholy companions about her childhood; it is there, he supposes, that true sorrow first takes root. Robertson’s story is sinisterly opaque, not least because the tables are eventually turned on the predatory narrator (the past tense of his opening confession is surely significant in that respect). Things start to fall apart after his brief encounter (a late-night quickie) with a woman who boldly describes her childhood as ‘lots of laughs’. This entanglement precipitates such a crisis of confidence in him that he suddenly has the urge to redecorate his yuppie apartment: ‘I wanted to go downstairs and take the car from the garage and drive out of the city to the suburbs, and in the unfamiliar streets I wanted to find a Bunnings.’ There is a deft comic touch here, but the dominant note is indeed a blue one, suggesting a vast metropolis of inexplicable sorrow.

Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? focuses on the unsolved disappearance of the eponymous figure. Hean was an environmental activist who vanished in 1972 while flying to Canberra to campaign against the destruction of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, which was to be flooded for a hydro-electric scheme. The text is written by documentary film-maker Scott Millwood, who ‘offered a $100,000 reward for information that would lead to an answer to the mystery’.

The Trip is what happens when Ancient Greek mythology is mixed with Australian history. In a breezy 175 pages, George Papaellinas provides a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey. He also revisits various highlights (and lowlights) from our country’s past. The result is an amusing and highly idiosyncratic read.

and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,

and from every crime bullets are born

which will one day find

the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves

and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see

the blood in the streets.

Come and see the blood

in the streets!

So wrote Pablo Neruda, of the Spanish Civil War (‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’, 1947). These words could apply in any place where children are made to suffer and thus to hate. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Where the Streets Had a Name is a book whose pages resonate with these themes, unflinchingly; remarkable because hers is a book written for children and about children – those living in the West Bank.

'MODERN TIMES constantly challenges the reader to consider the nature of modernity and of modernism and its structure.’ Virginia Spate’s lucid preface to the volume articulates why this handsomely illustrated and well-researched book is such a ground-breaking history of Australian modernism. It acts as a companion volume to Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (2007), which was an anthology of primary source documents including diaries, letters, talks and manifestos. These revealed Australia’s engagement with international modernist trends and the role of interior and fashion design in developing modernist principles. These developments occurred despite the Australian conservative government’s opposition to them, particularly when it came to the area of fine arts practice. Modern Times is aimed at a broader readership than its predecessor and is connected with a touring exhibition on show at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum until 15 February 2009. The book includes twenty-five articles written by academics, artists and curators from a range of different disciplines, including visual art, design, architecture, animation, fashion, popular culture, film and photography. These articles are divided into five themes that cover abstraction, the body, the city, space age, and electric signs and spectacles.