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Anthony Lynch

In his polemical Introduction, Les Murray notes that Quadrant was founded sixty years ago by poet James McAuley, the ‘stern formalist’ who ensured that poetry occupied a prominent place in the magazine. Poetry has continued to be central to Quadrant, its profile not waning under Murray’s stewardship as ...

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‘Dark satanic mills won the day’, S.K. Kelen tells us in one of his strongest poems, ‘Slouching’. ‘Cold modernity followed, a brooding European / monochrome hinted at worlds passing (the good old days).’ What many critics take to be William Blake’s damning of the Industrial Revolution – ‘And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?’ (from ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, c.1804) – could easily have served as an epigraph for Kelen’s Island Earth. The industrial age, its intrusion upon great swathes of the ‘emerald world’, has been variously and often compellingly dissected by Kelen throughout his poetic career, which spans more than three decades and is represented in this New and Selected. Also scrutinised is industrialism’s accomplice and enabler: the increasingly global economy that, for Kelen, has made a hostile takeover of human activity at almost every level.

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From Kafka on, we can trace a line of narratives dealing with alienation in the modern workplace, with forces seen and unseen overwhelming individual volition. S.J. Finn’s first novel makes a humorous contribution to this tradition.

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Andrew Taylor’s latest book reprises themes common to many of his earlier poetry collections – movement between the antipodes and Europe; the natural landscape; affinities with music – but also, as the title suggests, themes of haunting and unhaunting, visitation and absence. Taylor was ill with cancer in 2003, and his confrontation with death has strongly informed The Unhaunting. The book is divided into five sections, and while the trajectory is far from linear, a sense of moving from darkness to light, from threat to release, unfolds.

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As John Frow and Katrina Schlunke state in their editorial, the diverse writing in this issue of Cultural Studies Review, collected under the theme of ‘Homefronts’, includes essays dealing with nationhood, family, the manufacture of crisis and celebrity, neo-liberalism and homelessness. Given the space to explore complexity, many contributions remain refreshingly accessible to the non-specialist reader. Popular culture is, of course, one of the mainstays of cultural studies, and the first two essays concern themselves with film. Jon Stratton’s insightful opening essay posits that the Australian tilt towards neo-liberalism from the mid 1990s, with its replacement of the social contract with individualism, has led to a series of films in which individual contracts and narratives of revenge are legitimised. Concerns with this ideological shift pervade a number of the essays, including pointed analyses of TV networks mining tragedy and triumph in Beaconsfield (by Jason Bainbridge) and the Howard government’s constructions of ‘crisis’ in indigenous communities (Virginia Watson).

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The latest Antipodes opens with Katherine Bode’s provocative discussion of Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale. Dissecting McDonald’s ‘fantasy of an all-white, all-male Australian society’, Bode’s essay also criticises Inga Clendinnen for exempting McDonald’s novel from her much-aired arguments against historical fiction. Bernadette Brennan draws on Maurice Blanchot to explore ‘the ungraspable experience of death’ evoked in works by Alex Miller and Noel Rowe, and Lyn McCredden has philosopher René Girard in mind when revisiting the familiar territory of the Lindy Chamberlain case and the ‘rituals of perpetual scapegoating’. Helen Gildfind ‘meets’ Janet Frame through Frame’s autobiographies, and reflects on the ‘reader’s power to decide the autobiographical status of a text’. The result is interestingly self-reflexive, but some readers might prefer more Frame and less Gildfind.

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'It’s in your hands, Julianne,’ proclaims an e-mail from Barack Obama. So opens the latest Griffith Review, which explores the many ways that, across the globe, individuals and groups are taking social, political and environmental matters into their own hands. Addressee aside, the Obama e-mail sent to editor Schultz in the final week of the US election campaign landed in the virtual hands of millions. But as Schultz notes, the Obama campaign saw ‘social networking’ on a massive scale, made millions feel involved and, she posits, saw a concomitant end to the ‘era of mass media politics’. Marian Arkin’s memoir picks up on campaign engagement, recalling her involvement with a large-scale community of volunteer lawyers working to protect the integrity of the US election process. Arkin’s article provides a useful guide to those who find the US electoral college system a mystery.

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It is fitting that ‘Waking’, a poem that links waking with birth, opens this inspired début collection from Emma Jones: ‘There was one morning // when my mother woke and felt a twitch / inside, like the shifting of curtains. // She woke and so did I.’ So the narrator-poet announces her arrival. The birthing theme continues in the next poem, ‘Farming’, in which pearls are ‘shucked from the heart of their grey mothers’. The same poem also foregrounds the poet’s interest in Ballard-like submerged worlds – oyster farms and shipwrecks, but also entire cities – and in the polarities of sky and sea. Indeed, this collection as a whole engages imaginatively with many dualisms: worldly/other worldly, internal/external, being/not being, self/other. Jones’s method is one of controlled playfulness, and despite many allusions to biblical themes and imagery, she avoids the didactic dualism of good/evil.

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One year after Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit, Griffith Review 23 features comment from selected summiteers in the ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ group, and others. Editor Julianne Schultz’s introduction provides a short history of support for writers and artists beginning 250 years ago when Lord Bute, the prime minister, granting Samuel Johnson a government-funded pension for life, warned against ‘Reducing discussion of the arts, creativity and culture to economics …’

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Indigo Vol. 3 edited by Sarah French, Richard Rossiter and Deborah Hunn

by
April 2009, no. 310

As Donna Ward indicates in her editorial, the latest issue of Indigo is dedicated partly to the generalist category of creative non-fiction. Ward’s editorial, structured around an anecdote concerning Helen Garner, flirts with this ‘new’ genre, employing techniques of fiction to convey factual events. But her assertion that in reading Garner we are ‘Distracted by whether or not her fiction is fact, [and] we forget that her work challenges because all of it is born of her life experience’ muddies the genre waters instead of illuminating how creative non-fiction might be usefully distinguished from fiction and other forms of (not-so-creative?) non-fiction.

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