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David Gilbey

f ourW twenty-two is an initiative of the Booranga Writers’ Centre in Wagga Wagga. This current edition features short stories and poems by (predominantly) Australian writers. Some of these writers are prominent names; others are relatively unknown.

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Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language.

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El Dorado by Dorothy Porter

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May 2007, no. 291

Dorothy Porter’s verse novels are delicious and distancing, formal, fiery and frenetic. With the possible exception of What a Piece of Work (1999), they get better and better. Early on, El Dorado smacks you in the face and strokes your imagination with a ‘little girl’s / dead hand / … sticking stiffly / up / as if reaching / to grab an angel’s / foot’. Framed by epigraphs from Gilgamesh, Peter Pan and Wallace Stevens, an enigmatic gesture of thanks ‘for the magic snakes’, a stanza from Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’ and a prologue invoking the ‘thick alien ice’ of Europa, Porter’s latest verse novel is contextualised with multiple, allusive legendry. This is a work that invokes and reimagines, iconoclastically, various fantasies (Atlantis, Neverland, El Dorado), mythologies (Greek, Roman, Christian) and pop-ular culture fantasists such as Disney, the Beatles, the Flintstones, and literary allusions to Shakespeare, Keats, Donne, Dickinson, Stevenson, Doyle, Carroll, Twain. El Dorado is as much about how fantasy works as it is a fantastic detective narrative.

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On a recent plane trip from Wagga to Sydney, I was talking to an engineer who uses X-ray technology to examine the deep structure of aircraft after stress, to assess airworthiness. Complicated, fascinating, with considerable and direct bearing on passenger safety. By way of exchange, I read him parts of Aileen Kelly’s ‘Simple’, an impressive poem that, in three stanzas, X-rays the history of Christianity. One of the latter’s faultlines ‘racked / sweet fanatic poets between lambchrist / and tigerchrist’. Other stress fractures are ‘the dark arcades / where losers piss themselves / off the edge of memory’. My travelling companion had an immediate sense of Kelly’s fine metaphysics, which, as the back-page blurb glosses, finds ‘the numinous in the undeniably secular’.

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Glassmaker by Shane McCauley & Geology by Kevin Murray

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May 2006, no. 281

Okay, I’ll take up Kevin Murray’s challenge in his poem ‘Freelance’ – that the reviewer is ‘a rogue knight / circling other men’s dragons’, though, like Max Richards, I reject Walter Benjamin’s Romantic formulation of criticism as a ‘fulfilment / of the artwork’. Each of these dragons has some fine points; all are modest in their own ways and illustrate Shane McCauley’s gloss of Robert Frost, ‘having the grace / to say that perhaps poetry doesn’t matter very much’. But in different ways, all three focus intently on the compelling significance of the minute, nuanced moments and details as a means of exploring big questions about ageing/mortality; the revelation and casualness of nature; the meaningfulness of history at both personal and public levels; and the functions and significance of art and writing. All are in various ways influenced by both the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge (particularly the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ aspect) as well as the modernist urban scepticism of T.S. Eliot. These are mannerly dragons. None will scorch the gentil reader-knight. Nor is there a hint of halitosis.

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One of the things Rod Moran is good at is an oxymoronic tenacity – a kind of deliberate insouciance, a restrained violence – due to his embrace of metaphor. His best poems articulate disturbing comparisons and create surreal hybrids. You can see this in some of the early poems from High Rise Sniper (1970–80) selected for this new collection, such as ‘Chemical Worker’: ‘this pure acid, like some cruel psalm, / gives us daily bread ... [the living] / have a place in the maggot’s equation.’ Or, from ‘Cross Country’: ‘half a galah flock/ is spattered in its own pink / feathers and gore in mad array, / swimming down the highway / like grotesque fish / in the heat’s bright lagoon.’ The poems have an intensity that demands considerable attention and makes every line count.

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‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.

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What the Painter Saw in Our Faces by Peter Boyle & The June Fireworks by Adrian Caesar

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November 2001, no. 236

These two new collections are obverses in contemporary Australian poetry and show the opposing, but often interlocked, tensions between modernism and postmodernism. The poems in both books concern themselves with art’s capacity to create or suggest other worlds. Both use painting and the visual arts in dramatically different ways as metaphors and motifs. Both collections fragment and project the perceiving self into alternative ficto-autobiographies, but with different expectations of resolution. Both conjure up real worlds of political and institutional corruption on an international scale and pit moments of fragile subjectivity and domestic harmony against grubby injustice. Both register their authors’ age at around fifty. Caesar hankers after an ethical response; Boyle juxtaposes aesthetic possibilities. Caesar’s poetry is restrained, measured, spare; Boyle’s is crowded, insistent, histrionic.

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Running hot on the national Austlit Discussion Group email waves recently was the question of speaking position and voice for men in contemporary critical discourse. What had occasioned the discussion was ASAL’s annual conference in Canberra, part of which had been a very successful morning at the Australian War Memorial focussing on writing and war (e.g. Alan Gould and Don Charlwood).

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I am enmeshed in criticism. Criticism defines and speaks me. I criticise, therefore I have a job. But criticism is a tricky business. It’s partial, changes from one time/place/person to another (as Jennifer Gribble acknowledges).

I’m not an expert on Janet Frame or Christina Stead (although I’ve included books by each on courses in the past) and my awareness of Peter Goldsworthy’s oeuvre is better but patchy. Like most university lecturers (I suppose), I read more reviews than actual books, although my preference is for the reverse. But with the vision of ABR’s editor as the bejewelled ringmistress conjured up in Gina Mercer’s book, I don my cap and bells, cry ‘Nuncle!’, and off I go into the hurricane.

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