Anthony Lynch

Anthony Lynch reviews 'When I Saw the Animal' by Bernard Cohen

November 2018, no. 406 • 25 October 2018

As a boy, I watched with fascination an early sci-fi horror film, The Blob. After a meteorite lands in Pennsylvania, a small, gelatinous blob emerges from the crater. Starting with an inquisitive old man who probes this runaway black pudding with his walking stick, the blob proceeds to consume, literally, everything in its path, growing in girth and bringing greater terrors with each new small-tow ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'The True Colour of the Sea' by Robert Drewe

September 2018, no. 404 • 23 August 2018

Robert Drewe’s first short story collection, the widely acclaimed The Bodysurfers (1983), opens with a story of the Lang family – children Annie, David, and Max, taken by their recently widowed father for a Christmas Day lunch at a local hotel, where it becomes apparent that their father is on intimate terms with the hotel manageress. This lunch, the desultory aftermath with the children left ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'The Wisdom Tree: Five novellas' by Nick Earls

September 2016, no. 384 • 23 August 2016

In the final novella of Nick Earls's quintet The Wisdom Tree, a benign security guard, Wanda, misquotes Tolstoy: 'No family is perfect. But each family isn't perfect in its own way.' Crossing between continents, each of these intersecting novellas reveals characters who variously express love for the institution of family and opportunistically exploit it. Compromised ambition flourishes throughout ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'The Landing' by Susan Johnson

September 2015, no. 374 • 26 August 2015

‘How did you even begin to fit two adult lives together so that they happily resembled a whole?’ Jonathan Lott, the main character in Susan Johnson’s tenth novel, asks himself. It is giving little away to say that by book’s end there are no definitive answers. But Jonathan’s attempts to make sense of his wife Sarah’s defection from their decades-long marriage are at the core of The Lan ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'Travelling Without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe companion' edited by Cassandra Atherton and 'My Feet Are Hungry' by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

October 2014, no. 365 • 01 October 2014

The title of Cassandra Atherton’s anthology, Travelling Without Gods, alludes to the particular brand of agnosticism that has run through Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s work over many decades. Journeying sans deity is evidenced strongly in the poet’s latest collection, a book which, like Atherton’s, has been published to coincide with Wallace-Crabbe’s eightieth birthday. For a non-believer, Wal ... (read more)

'Crying on cue', a new poem by Anthony Lynch

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357 • 01 December 2013

True Stories: Babes in Hollywood, directed by Dan Sturman and Dylan Nelson (2011) An American wannabe child star told the workshop of his still-born brother. How his mother had said the lost one, endlessly cast in a silent movie, looked just like himself. Niagara broke over the boy’s cheeks. The fat kid to his left, cast always as a bully, patted his arm. The workshop leader said That’s great ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'Four Plots for Magnets' by Luke Davies

September 2013, no. 354 • 28 August 2013

In 1982 a young Steve Kelen published a slim volume by an even younger poet by the name of Luke Davies. Four Plots for Magnets was a chapbook of thirteen poems written mostly when the poet was eighteen and nineteen. Published by Glandular Press, an outlet established by Kelen and the painter Ken Searle in 1980, this ‘sampler’ (as Kelen later calls it) was in a monochrome, staple-bound format. ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'Goad Omen' by Corey Wakeling

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 27 June 2013

Early in his Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton quotes the Russian formalist critic Roman Jakobson: ‘[literature is writing that represents] organised violence committed on ordinary speech.’ I don’t know if Corey Wakeling has been influenced by the formalists’ theories, but Goad Omen, his energetic first collection, is replete with estranging devices that bring attention to p ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews Westerly Vol. 57, No. 2, edited by Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

May 2013, no. 351 • 28 April 2013

‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, ... (read more)

Anthony Lynch reviews 'Collusion' by Brook Emery

December 2012–January 2013, no. 347 • 27 November 2012

Brook Emery’s opening poem in Collusion is addressed to ‘Dear K’, an address reprised in the last, movingly lyrical poem in this his fourth collection. We might read the intervening poems as a correspondence with ‘K’, this other who halfway through the collection is referred to as ‘my interlocutor, my conscience’. Emery cleverly anticipates and plays with the possible relation to tha ... (read more)