Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Essays

A Nation Apart edited by John McLaren

by
September 1983, no. 54

A Nation Apart is the title of this book of essays on contemporary Australia and it’s a good title because it summarises the fragmentation, the sense of disparateness, which characterizes this nation at the moment – and characterises the book itself.

... (read more)

Lydia Davis writes long essays and short stories; some of them, like this one of six words, very short indeed: ‘INDEX ENTRY: Christian, I’m not a’. Influenced by Kafka and Beckett, she is drawn to Anglo-Saxon words, complex sentences, and literary forms which are hard to define. In the United States she has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Genius Grants; in France she is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters; in the United Kingdom she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for what Christopher Ricks, chair of the judges, called her ‘vigilance … to the very word or syllable’. Rick Moody calls her ‘the best prose stylist in America’, The New York Times compares her precision to that of Vermeer, while for her publisher she is simply ‘beyond compare’. Claire Messud, looking for fresh adulatory epithets, says that Lydia Davis ‘has the gift of making us feel alive’. What, then, am I missing?

... (read more)

In a review of several books on motherhood (LRB, 14 June 2014), Jacqueline Rose – feminist, writer on psychoanalysis, English professor, ‘public intellectual’ – interprets Adrienne Rich’s belief that to give birth is to testify to the possibilities of humanity, as a variation on Hannah Arendt’s formulation, in an essay on totalitarianism, that ‘freedom is identical with the capacity to begin’. As bearers of new lives, women are thus the repositories of tremendous power, which is undermined by the patriarchy. Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times (1968) provided the framework for Rose’s exhilarating, disturbing, ‘scandalous’ (Rose calls for a ‘scandalous feminism’ in the preface) book, Women in Dark Times.

... (read more)

In appraising the poet Peter Porter, David Malouf writes that ‘the world we inhabit is a vast museum – call it History, or Art, or the History of Art. For Porter, the exhibits were still alive and active.’ So it is with Malouf himself: his world includes Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the awful and bloody twentieth century, a Brisbane childhood, and much more – including an abiding intellectual embrace of great writers and great writing.

... (read more)

Poetry ‘cannot be an ark to help us survive the flood’, wrote Zbigniew Herbert in 1948: ‘It has to be our daily bread, an article of primary need.’ Nothing could be more truly said of Clive James’s approach to poetry. His latest assemblage of essays, reviews, and miscellanea, collected over the years that straddle his diagnosis of leukemia, feel necessary as oxygen. There is a quiet restlessness too: a sense of sorting papers into some final order.

... (read more)

In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fine writing and art.

With fate as its theme, much of the work in this edition speaks to love, loss, and mortality. Which is not to say that it makes for grim reading. The lead story, Louise Erdrich’s ‘Domain’, may be dark in subject matter, but it is also playful. A take on a no doubt popular science fiction theme, ‘Domain’ presents a future world in which the quality of your digitally uploaded afterlife is determined by which of the various corporate-owned simulations you can afford. It is literary in tone without sacrificing the pay-off of genre.

... (read more)

Southerly, Vol. 72, No. 2 edited by Melissa Jane Hardie

by
May 2013, no. 351

The critical essays collected in this current issue of Australia’s oldest literary journal make for frustrating reading. The theme is true crime, with a focus on the relationship between the sensational and the literary. Topics range from Underbelly Razor to the Jerilderie Letter to Schapelle Corby’s autobiography. Fascinating material, no doubt, but most of the contributions fail to engage and feel more like mutilated book chapters or hurriedly swept-together research notes, characterised by erratic analyses and flabby prose.

... (read more)

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

by
May 2013, no. 351

‘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, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.

... (read more)

We are often far / From home in a dark town’ writes Charlie Smith in his poem ‘The Meaning of Birds’. Home Truth explores dark towns both literal and figurative. The pieces in any anthology are jigsaw-like, forming an overarching image. In this case, it is a sense of home as an entity most powerfully felt in exile; the place we look to from our darkest places. In her perceptive essay, Carmel Bird, scrutinising her immediate thoughts about home, finds in them much that looks like ‘a series of clichés and stereotypes’. Concepts of home, she suggests, may be ‘tinged with the glow of nostalgia, shadowed by poignant reminders of the ideal past’. If this is the face of the anthology’s jigsaw, it proves palimpsestic. Its deeper vision is the idea of resilience and of making a home from a position of exile.

... (read more)

What a wonderful thing is the essay! What a hymn to the human mind and its vagaries and cogitations – to its humanness. All honour to Australian Book Review and the Cultural Fund of Copyright Agency Limited for celebrating it with the Calibre Prize – and, of course, to our prize-winning hymnists.

To celebrate the essay with this degree of fanfare shows a certain amount of chutzpah, I think – of ‘courage’ in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word. (‘A courageous decision, Minister.’)

... (read more)