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Lyn McCredden

Lyn McCredden heads the Writing and Literature group at Deakin. She researches in Australian literature, her 2017 critical monograph being The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press).

Lyn McCredden reviews ‘At the Flash & At the Baci’ by Ken Bolton

June-July 2006, no. 282 01 June 2006
I learnt today, while being read Ken Bolton’s poetry aloud by a friend (a native South Australian), that Hindley rhymes with ‘kind’ and not with ‘wind’. My friend spontaneously started reading to me and couldn’t stop. It runs on, this K.B. speaking voice: compulsive, South Australian, poetic, paranoid, poignant, funny. One way of describing the experience of reading Bolton is that you ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews ''Meanjin', Vol. 66, No. 4 & Vol. 67, No. 1: Eternal Summer' edited by Ian Britain, 'Griffith Review 20: Cities on the Edge' edited by Julianne Schultz, and 'Overland 190' edited by Jeff Sparrow

June 2008, no. 302 01 June 2008
Robert Drewe, one of Australia’s most absorbing fiction writers, has prime position in the opening pages of the latest Meanjin. ‘The Aquarium at Night’ is so deft and engaging it draws me in, almost despite myself. It is a story about boys, surfing, prison life and ‘easygoing’ Australian masculinity. These topics may not immediately appeal, but the story stirs with the rhythms of memory, ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'Scar Revision' by Tracy Ryan

July–August 2008, no. 303 01 July 2008
On a first reading, the accomplished poetry of Tracy Ryan seems spiky, colloquial, earthy and enjoyable. But the more subtle accomplishments of the poetry lie in wait on a second reading: the musicality, the careful crafting, an honouring of the traditions of poetry, the rhythms and experiences of the everyday and the bodily. To name her themes draws us into the poetry: motherhood, the vicissitude ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian fantasy' by Jennifer Rutherford

August 2001, no. 233 01 August 2001
This Gauche intruder into the Australian book scene is sure to annoy many readers. Their annoyance, even disgust, will be various and peculiar to their own preoccupation with what they consider a good read, good literary criticism, good Australian cultural identity. Jennifer Rutherford presents us with a passionate, scholarly, rude and uncompromising discussion about Australian culture, reading id ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'View From The Lucky Hotel' by Sandy Fitts

December 2008–January 2009, no. 307 01 December 2008
There are traces of a constant, oscillating motion of conscience in Sandy Fitts’s poetry. References to the burden of ‘history’ pit the poems, with ‘history’ standing for everything we need to address in the present, through the power of eloquence, but also in fear that such words are not enough. From the opening, prize-winning poem, ‘Waiting for Goya’, to the closing images of ‘Bl ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'James McAuley: Poetry, essays and personal commentary' edited by Leonie Kramer

June 1988, no. 101 01 June 1988
The dominant note of Professor Kramer’s long-awaited James McAuley is control. The volume will no doubt be gratefully received by lovers and adversaries of McAuley’s literary achievement, for many reasons: it brings before a wider reading audience guile a few new poems published only in the little-circulated volume Time Given (1976). These poems can now receive their due and wider admiration. ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'Meanjin vol. 66, no. 2' edited by Ian Britian and 'Griffith Review no. 17' edited by Julianne Schultz

October 2007, no. 295 01 October 2007
They were once called literary magazines, or journals, though dailiness was never aimed for. Monthliness is popular now, or, in the case of Meanjin and Griffith Review, quarterliness. But what kind of currency do these two magazines aim for? ‘New writing in Australia’ proclaims the subtitle of Meanjin’s latest volume; along with the banner title ‘Globalisation and Postcolonial Culture’, ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'Westerly vol. 51' edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell and 'HEAT no. 12' edited by Ivor Indyk

February 2007, no. 288 01 March 2007
Who reads literary magazines, and why do they? Writers looking for what is being published, academics keeping up with who is being published, the elusive ‘general reader’ looking for a good read? The current volumes of HEAT and Westerly offer multiple reasons and rewards for picking them up, reasons which extend well beyond these superficial factors. Reasons which may send you to the postbox w ... (read more)

Lyn McCredden reviews 'Circus-Apprentice' by Katherine Gallagher

May 2007, no. 291 01 May 2007
Katherine Gallagher’s is a poetry of small spaces and objects, tiny hollows of memory that momentarily glow, incandescent, in the imagination: ‘knotted roots / reaching down into the riverbed’, ‘faces mottled in eucalyptus shade’, that place ‘beside the pond, in foaming clusters / creamy flowers of meadowsweet; / and there’s goatsbeard (‘jack-go-to-bed-at-noon’) / bird’s-foot t ... (read more)