Accessibility Tools

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

Archive

I have lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs for almost a decade. I am also an aficionado of Australian literature. Thus, I was interested to read Stamping Ground, a collection of writings about my favourite side of the Yarra River.

... (read more)

In Dark Bright Doors, her tenth book, Jill Jones again explores a sense of contradiction. Perhaps in tune with this theme, Jones’s work here also shows two distinct types of poems, one that is part-hallucinatory, invoking the elements ‘air’, ‘water’ and an encompassing natural world of breath, rain, sky, sun, wings. In these poems, Jones attempts to describe the indescribable, to remark on or absorb the world’s beauty and peril. Many of these poems consequently feel insubstantial and vague, though that may be their aim – to suggest, to hint at something, to sketch in mystery, rather than to pin it down.

... (read more)

For W.B. Yeats, Ireland was the place and source of poetry, even when he was living in Oxford or London. It was also a mythical figure, enabling of ardour and of song, the desirable ‘Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan’; and it became a delicately evocative crepuscule, mocked by Brendan Kennelly when he opens a poem with ‘Now in the Celtic twilight decrepit whores / Prowl warily along the Grand Canal’. The very phrase ‘Irish poetry’ sounds like a pleonasm. For that moist country has long seemed synonymous with verse and folksong: just as Holland is synonymous with painting and France with elegant thought. Further, when I think of contemporary poets in our widespread language, Seamus Heaney must surely be the dominant world figure and Paul Muldoon the most verbally dazzling, even if our Les is close to Paul in this caper.

... (read more)

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn’. We might add that Oz Lit owes Twain a little something, too.

... (read more)

One day soon, instead of meekly thanking the Editor for another memoir, I’m going to scream. Not another damned life story, confession, self-exploration! I’m fed up, I’ll shout – fed up with women (because they always are) whose only way of writing about their times is to plonk themselves at the centre (which they are, in a literal sense) and to define everything through their own feminism, jacket, migraine, dog, marriage, job or dependency.

... (read more)

In his influential book The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne argued: ‘The time has come when broad views of change that now seem impractical will seem sensible and to the point.’ This argument is taken up by the contributors to Griffith Review 28. These contributors explore the ways that Australia has reinvented itself in recent years, both economically and culturally.

... (read more)

Julia moves to Lovely, a fictional country town in Victoria, with her yoga-teaching husband, Bryant, and their two children. The place is dismal; Julia can’t find a decent cup of coffee; the local plumbers won’t come to install her espresso machine; and she misses her ballet-dancing friends back in Melbourne.

Soon after arriving, she meets Tom, a young man who can see auras and hear people’s ‘inner songs’. Julia can also hear Tom’s ‘song’, and they are inexorably drawn to each other. Bryant, similarly drawn to Tom, decides to heal his troubled soul. New Age spirituality infuses Milk Fever, at times to the detriment of the narrative. Tom and Julia’s attraction is so heavily linked to spiritual resonance that their eventual relationship seems based on little more than cosmic codependency. This is a pity, because there is much here to suggest that the author understands the complexity of relationships, self-doubt and the past’s influence on the present.

... (read more)

Son-biography: which are deft or lived things
which have jumped from him without genes.
Passions, eccentricities, duty? I don’t believe
Lamarck, but I left his Quiet for her Talk,
nagging the life out of things, worsened it
word-wise, garrulous, and then heavied it
because Saloms drink, his side, but genes,
though he didn’t, and she offered her whole
life to the sobriety of wives. He voted sober
but gave me his black-sheep toss-the-world
bushiness, which I took as city, and poetry.
He said I was a fraud, which meant I didn’t

... (read more)

Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.

... (read more)

In Australia, fewer than one in three expected deaths takes place outside an institution, but eighty per cent of people say they would rather die at home.

... (read more)