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Dominique Hecq and Brian Edwards are well versed in the contingencies of language, roaming in their poetry between experimentation and high tradition – at least in terms of content, if not so much in form. Both target the self-reflexive play of language early in their latest collections: Hecq in her title poem, with ‘words spreading / like couchgrass after summer rains / on my tongue’; Edwards even more demonstrably in ‘Reading Althusser on Marx’, where ‘Standing between objects and meanings / the language: there are only partial truths’.

University of Western Australia Press should be commended for recognising a significant gap in Australian literary scholarship: a book-length study on the work of Tim Winton. Aside from Tim Winton: A Celebration (1999; not a critical work), and Michael McGirr’s Tim Winton: The Writer and His Work (1999), written for young readers, there have been no major studies of his work and little critical commentary. Is Peter Craven’s response to Dirt Music (2001) – which he called a ‘profoundly vulgar book’ that ‘bellyflops into a sort of inflated populism’ – widely shared? Is Winton on the nose because he is popular? Certainly, there is nothing sexy about Winton’s work; it embodies wholesome and worthy values, without shying away from stories where these values are absent. But he is a damn good writer – a difficult thing to measure, I know. His work resonates for many people. Whether they adore it or hate it (think Cloudstreet [1991]), people who have read Winton have an opinion on him. Winton’s work, particularly The Turning (2004), prompts interesting questions about contemporary Australian life.

Inspector Anders, the one-legged anti-terrorist expert, is back. In Marshall Browne’s new novel, he returns to Italy after being sent to the safety of a Europol desk, away from the southern Italian mafia, who had sworn, and attempted, to kill him. Outspoken right-wing politicians are being murdered, and all the signs point to serial killings with deep-seated motives.

‘The stories you will read in this book have been written primarily from memory and many years after the fact. Everything within these pages is true in essence, polished by how I experienced it and as I remember it.’

Presented in three parts on a canvas of time and distance, Pip Newling’s first work of non-fiction recounts her time as a barkeeper in two remote northern Australian communities, Halls Creek and Mataranka. Blondie, as she comes to be known, is a restless and strong-willed 23-year-old in 1990, when she sets out to find ‘the real, the experience, the education’. These towns – communal outposts where race, sex, heat, isolation and desperation collide – are well equipped to provide them. Newling relates her experiences through a series of vignettes, full of memory’s spaces and slippages, but with a definite temporal dimension, a sense of time traced. Such is their impact, the stories probably didn’t need a gifted writer to bring them to life.

The dust jacket describes James Fenton as ‘rightly praised for his own love poetry’. Evidently, Fenton does not demur, because he has found room for six of his own poems when other likely names are represented less generously or not at all. But more of that anon. The introduction begins by quoting Michael Longley: ‘I have believed for a long time … that love poetry is at the core of the enterprise: if poetry is a wheel, then the hub of the wheel is love poetry. Poems which articulate all the other cares and attachments … radiate from the hub like spokes on a wheel.’ Fenton continues: ‘I love you. You love me. I used to love you. You don’t love me. I want to sleep with you. Here we are in bed together. I hate you. You betrayed me. I’ve betrayed you. I want to kill you. Oh no! I have killed you. Such are the simple propositions on which these lyrics elaborate.’

Neville Wran was nothing if not sartorial. He represented the new generation of politicians – dapper, immaculately tailored, effortlessly elegant – and stood out from his Labor colleagues in their crumpled suits and gaudy ties. His dress sense was not merely a matter of personal taste but also a political statement. He once appeared on the podium of a Labor party conference perspiring uncomfortably in the glare of the arc lights. A colleague leaned over and urged him to take off his jacket. Wran retorted, ‘What! And look like a Labor politician.’ It was classic Nev.

The Butterfly Effect is a travel guide to the inner sanctum of lesbian sensibility. The title of the work comes from the last line of the first poem, ‘Strange Tractors’ (which was selected in The Best Australian Poems 2006): ‘chaos in the shape of two vulval wings, the butterfly effect.’ The butterfly effect is also a concept from physics, where the flap of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the planet can cause storms on the other.