Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Cath Kenneally

the priests and the witchdoctors both
will bless your new vehicle; the Virgin
will keep you in mind if you fashion a model
of what you want, attach it to the front of the car

                                 & ...

Back at Cranfield Street by 5
Motorway horridness receding into fumey oblivion
We are just in time for Pointless – words ending in ‘air’
‘debonair’ ? – others, phoned at random, knew that one

Two pounds fifty left on my Oyster card once I’ve put it through the barrier at
the delicate, high-slung, white and black, wooden pedestrian bridge over the
...

Fed Wendy’s cat, walked to Broadway
Market through London Fields

a month from now these will be
once again names to conjure with

jump on a 236
Newington Green
lured by the memory
of Belle Epoque patisserie
glowing golden in a corner

always misremembered

as Raisin D’Etre

My fellow-travellers clearly
...

a tablescape

drooping roses near death in a jam jar
dull Ian Rankin in a yellow cover lying upside down
Mongolian phrasebook
sample tube of Sensodyne
Cinema ticket: The Great Beauty
opener for the Italian Film Festival
password to Smartygrants
for accessing two hundred applications
business card for Phnom Penh silver and gemstone ...

Cath Kenneally 240Cath Kenneally is an Adelaide poet and novelist whose book Around Here (Wakefield Press, 2002) won the John Bray National Poetry Prize. Of her six volumes of poetry, the latest is eaten cold ( ...

Cath Keneally’s second novel, Jetty Road, is set in the beachside suburb of Glenelg, South Australia. Her subject is the relationship between two sisters in early middle age, and the narrative is fabricated from the daily happenings of their lives. Evie, the older sister by several years, has no children and ekes out a living in a number of part-time jobs as a child-care worker. Paula, matron of an aged care home, has two children: Bert, aged nineteen, and Rosie, six. Neither of the sisters is married.

... (read more)

Below the Waterline edited by Garry Disher

by
May 1999, no. 210

Garry Disher is at it again: following the Personal Best short story collections (1 and 2) with this one, Below the Waterline. Broadly speaking, he’s attempting to highlight in this one authors who have come to prominence since the 1980s. Again, he allows the chosen authors to pick a favourite short story, and to include a sort of postscript that explains why it’s a favourite.

... (read more)

Here’s the first in a new series from the indefatigable pen of Jennifer Rowe. Verity Birdwood is still going strong, at last check: it wasn’t so long ago that I reviewed Lamb to the Slaughter in these pages. And, of course, as Emily Rodda, Rowe has turned out a couple of dozen Teen Power books, attracting several Children’s Book Awards. She is every inch a professional writer.

... (read more)

This is a serious tale of crime and punishment from Jean Bedford, who had been working up to it. Her Anna Southwood novels have been consistently good, their light touch obscuring not at all the author’s passion for justice, an old-fashioned sentiment which always informs the best crime novels, often most palpably present in crime fiction by women.

... (read more)

Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evi­dence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.

... (read more)