Giramondo

When John Tranter reviewed Jennifer Maiden’s first collection, Tactics (1974), he noted its ‘brilliant yet difficult imagery’ and a style ‘so idiosyncratic and forceful in a sense it becomes the subject of her work’... 

Nicholas Jose’s new novel, Original Face, begins violently. On the first page, a man is – expertly, and with a small knife – skinned alive, his face removed. We are in Sydney and the assassin’s name is Daozi, which in Chinese means knife. Jose’s seventh work of fiction traces the sometimes-brittle nature of identity as it plays with an ancient Chinese riddle: ‘Before your father and mother were born, what was your original face?’ It’s a confidently crafted pastiche; a kind of film-noir literature with a tender twist of Buddhist philosophy.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.

Admirer’s of Judith Beveridge’s distinctive talent have had a long wait between collections (it’s eight years since Accidental Grace), although she has been published consistently in anthologies and journals, and poems from the central sequence of this collection, ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, won the 2003 Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize. Patience is rewarded: this is a collection of impressive poetic maturity.

The Sleep of a Learning Man is the sixth verse collection from the gifted and exacting Anthony Lawrence. He has also written a novel. The epigraph to this book gives some hint as to where the poet stands, and where he intends to go. It is from Antonio Porcia: ‘I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.’ But looking is only one means to find his way, a dilemma that a number of the forty-two poems gathered here confronts.

Readers who share Helen Nickas’s view that Antigone Kefala’s fiction forms ‘a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey’ may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, Summer Visit. The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, ‘Intimacy’, seem ironic. In contrast, the third, ‘Conversations with Mother’, contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography.

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.