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This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forward, or a further refinement, of his work.

Dimitris Tsaloumas is often thought of as a poet writing between two languages. In his English poetry, this emerges in the way that the everyday diction of Greek often functions as the learned register of English. ‘Nostalgia’, as a compound word, is a modern Western coining, but when Tsaloumas opens the volume with ‘Nostalgia: A Diptych’, he evokes the Greek components of the word, particularly nostos with its connotation of Homeric return.

Literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, perhaps only to be hoped for under an imprint such as Australian Scholarly Publishing. Yet a search of its recent publications shows that among nineteen titles this is the only instance – and one facilitated by a Melbourne University publishing grant. Rightly so, for Cassandra L. Atherton’s is academic writing in the best sense of that abused adjective: argumentative, lucid, grounded in extensive research, sustained by a lively intelligence and harnessed to a bright idea. None of which means that I agree with everything she says, but then one function of good theoretical discourse is to provoke disagreement.

Once upon a time, identifying a good picture book was simple: it had bright-coloured illustrations, an easy-to-read text, and it dealt with things relevant to a child’s life. While these elements are still important, the genre has developed to such an extent that simplicity is no longer the prime criterion. As some recent titles show, picture books can cover a multitude of styles and themes; however, whatever their subject, the overriding criteria should always be artistic and literary excellence, and an ability to touch the reader.

Rhyll McMaster established her considerable reputation as a poet in the 1970s and 1980s.  Feather Man is her début novel. In a first-person narrative, the protagonist recounts her life story from the time when she was a child living in suburban Brisbane in the 1950s until her emergence as a painter in London in the 1970s. It is a Kunstleroman divided into four parts, each named for a significant male character who shapes her relationship to art. The narrator’s name is withheld until near the end, when we learn that, somewhat ambiguously, her classically educated father named her ‘Lyce’, from Horace’s Odes on Love.

Diane Coyle has a passion for economics and believes that the object of her passion should possess a soul. She fails to convince on this point, but that is of little account. She has written an absorbing book that sets out what economists do and that provides a commentary on current thinking.

Language shapes identity: everyone knows that, in theory. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that exact equivalents do not exist for every word. Translation cannot be perfect: something is always lost. So what happens when people, used to one linguistic identity, have to translate themselves into a new language? Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka have assembled twelve witnesses to give personal accounts. All are academics or writers who possess the intellectual resources to make sense of what they have encountered, while at the same time registering the dislocations they have experienced. All write English fluently: they are not concerned with the difficulties of learning English but of being themselves in Australian English. Some make the comment that they are perfectly comfortable writing academic English while still finding the small transactions of daily life a challenge.

Reading literary criticism can be like viewing a portrait: you are essentially subjected to another person’s vision of the subject. One can feel that the perspective is unduly harsh at some points, lavishly lenient at others. It is easy to project one’s own bias onto the work, and to take issue with the representation too quickly. This is particularly true of a critical monograph on a subject such as Christopher Koch, who has been both prominent and controversial throughout his career. It is difficult for any commentator on Koch not to be drawn into the ‘Australian Melodrama’ that Peter Pierce identified in Australian literary culture in 1995.