FACP

Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

His second book, The Projectionist (1983), is a kind of proto-novel constructed as a collection of poetry. It is impossible to summarise this book neatly, but it foregrounds the sensibility of a character called Mr Benchley, a retired film projectionist whose ‘reality’ is partly filmic. In this work, Salom investigates the elusiveness of human experience and reflects on how experience may be represented suggestively through audiovisual technology. He writes in one poem, ‘This playback of life’s feeding / every thread of the rough cocoon’ – the ‘cocoon’, among other things, being the self-reflexive activity of a lonely life.

Playback (1991) became the title of Salom’s first novel, recently reissued. The main protagonist is a male oral historian and folklorist living as a visitor in a country town. At the core of Playback is a mystery centred on a possible, and unsolved, crime, along with the erotic charge of an adulterous relationship between the oral historian and an artist. The novel progresses by counterpointing the past – captured in a growing, if precarious, store of taped oral histories – with the historian’s evolving and increasingly destabilised present. The dynamic is fairly merciless. Various forms of disintegration occur; the novel’s conclusion answers some key questions but leaves others unresolved. In both The Projectionist and Playback, people are shown never to be free of their pasts, even though they remember their lives poorly. They are depicted as often creating themselves and their fantasies on the ground of their own forgetting.

Levin’s God is a two-part epic. The first half is a take on the Australian rock scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Singer-guitarist Levin Hoffman, on the strength of what people say are ‘great songs’, rapidly takes his band the Barking Dogs to the top of the charts. Levin – believe it or not – finds that success is hollow and that not even his devoted Indian-Australian girlfriend, Shelley, or his long-time friend-cum-manager, Lawrence, can rescue him from his indefinable angst. The second half of the book sees Levin in Thailand, where, lying low at a monastery after witnessing a horrific murder, he becomes a devotee of meditation.

As Roger Hart, Roger Wells was the male lead in the group Little Heroes (not to be confused with their contemporaries, Little Murders), a Melbourne band that spent the first half of the 1980s making interesting rock records. They had a top ten hit, ‘One Perfect Day’, in 1982, which complemented the ‘new wave’ without alienating fans of more established music. Wells now works as a counsellor and has written a book on meditation, so one assumes that Levin’s God is built on a skeleton of experience, though much of the experience seems casually remembered. Tellingly, it is the travail of meditation and Levin’s struggle to purge his own desire and pain through meditative enlightenment that are most credible.

Born in Perth, I came as a boy to think of myself as a Yorkist: my summer holidays were often spent in that glittering town, and the first sound I can remember is the intransigent call of crows over the road there from the city. For entirely good reasons, the place is almost a myth to me.

In deeper and more complex ways, that territory is mythic to John Kinsella. His Peripheral Light would look very different, and much the poorer, if it were possible to subtract the mythic dimension from this book. Reading his ‘Wheatbelt Gothic or Discovering a Wyeth’, I am reminded of an essay of Guy Davenport’s in The Geography of the Imagination, in which he details how indebted Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ is to mythological motifs, and how thoroughly Wood has subsumed them. Kinsella, at his best, seems to me equally adept at living with imaginative indebtedness and at parlaying it into an asset.

These two unusual books reflect on aspects of the prisoner-of-war experience in Singapore, Thailand and Burma during World War II that have not been much canvassed in Australia. One Fourteenth of an Elephant, Ian Denys Peek’s sometimes irascible ‘memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway’, relates the experiences of a member of the Singapore Volunteer Armoured Car Company. Peek was British and had grown up in Shanghai, but was not taken into captivity there as was novelist J.G. Ballard (who recalled the experience in Empire of the Sun). Peek and his brother Ron were at the fall of Singapore. Soon afterwards began their movements between a series of hospital and labour camps along the railway. Peek’s story – his first book, published sixty years after his capture and told in the first person – gives a British perspective on a fate that he shared with thousands of Australians.

This is the tale of a quest driven by an obsession. At its heart are the Krakouers, an Australian family of five generations. The author is a descendant of the first Krakouers to settle in Western Australia. Terri-Ann White’s project is to record the gaps and silences, to piece together fragments, and ‘rescue’ family members ‘from obscurity’.

In my student days in Europe, I often heard the name Eileen Joyce bandied about as a figure of respect, eccentricity and past pianistic accomplishment. Geoffrey Parsons, one of my enduring musical mentors, regularly spoke of her; it came as no surprise to read in Richard Davis’s recent biography that Parsons collaborated in Joyce’s last major public appearance, at a fund-raising concert at Covent Garden, late in 1981. I rather doubt, however, that many familiar with Parsons’s pianistic stature would readily agree with Davis’s judgment that the ‘power and dexterity’ of the seventy-three-year-old Joyce, who had not performed in public for over a decade, ‘easily’ matched Parsons’s own.

It had to happen – a rush of books about the Olympics. But that doesn’t mean they’re all bad or that they won’t last now that the fuss is over. Celeste Walters’ The Last Race, her second book for young adults, should certainly be around for a while. The cover alone could sell the book and word of mouth should do the rest.

‘I remember only peripheries, not centres,’ Michèle Drouan says in her memoir of marriage to a Jordanian and life with his family in a village near Jordan’s borders with Syria and Lebanon. Her perspective is deliberately oblique. Elegantly shaped, and or the most part gracefully written, her story bypasses the obvious cultural divisions. Political, religious, and sexual tensions are given minimal treatment. No dates are given: you would hardly know that the Gulf War comes within the book’s timespan, and when the sound of bombs is heard from across the border, someone quietly says ‘Lebanon’, and leaves it at that.

Those Who Remain Will Always Remember is a fitting successor to Paperbark, the Muecke, Davis, Shoemaker, Mudrooroo anthology of a decade earlier. Though it is a regional publication, restricted to Aboriginal authors from Western Australia, it follows the same catholic principles of inclusion that made Paperbark a book of its time. Its editors Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill, and Rosemary van den Berg provide a kaleidoscopic image of Western Australian Aboriginal life in assembling writings which include critical essays, cultural-political statements, prose fiction, life histories, personal testimony, interviews, and poetry. Importantly, these disparate genres leave the reader with a sense of the editors’ unity of vision rather than ad hoc opportunism.

The problem with K.F. Pearson’s Melbourne Elegies is that Goethe – on whose classic of sex­tourism, Roman Elegies 1788–1790, these rhetorical, literary poems are loosely based – is Goethe: difficult to translate, still little read in English. It gives him problems. Pearson, to my mind, is not attempting a Poundian ‘replacement’ of an ancient text within the frame­work of a contemporary poetics. That would require a reckoning with the original poem’s logistics and context similar to the way that Pound’s Propertius speaks electrifyingly in the context of an Empire much later than the Roman one he wrote for; or in the manner that Christopher Logue has recently converted excerpts of Homer into a form of late 20th century literary cinema. Such replacement requires that the contemporary poem convince us that the original work’s ‘loss’ – a ‘loss’ produced equally by its inaccessible aesthetic no less than by our contemporary lack of language-skill and culture – should matter to us.