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John Kinsella

Searching for his crowd
out of the silence of the cloister,
black robes tousled by the nor’-wester,
first bite of heat caught on the brim

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Randolph Stow, who died in 2010 aged seventy-four, must now be considered part of the Australian canon, whether that concept is conceived broadly or as a smaller cluster of Leavisian peaks. This status derives from his eight novels, which include the Miles Franklin Award-winner To the Islands (1958), the celebrated children’s book Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967), the much studied The Merry-go-round in theSea (1965), and the book that many (including me) think his masterpiece, Visitants (1979).

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1.

Surrounded by the countless dead
And restrained in illness to her bed
The hilltipped winds that seared her face
Made her young as they made her old

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Head tilts to strings
beyond setting –
cross-notes of talk,
gallery folk

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This book of essays by the vegan-anarchist-pacifist poet John Kinsella on the relationship between political activism and poetry raises two big questions: how do we live in modernity? and what is it like to live beyond the mainstream? The first question lies behind the great cultural movements of the West, from Romanticism to postmodernism. Whether writers have embraced modernity or rejected it, they have long struggled with the very conditions that brought literary culture into existence. The utopian possibilities of modernity have always been in conflict with modernity’s material realities.

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Is the exercise of judgment the reason for a book review? I hate the idea of that. I would rather experiment with the genre by asking if it can add something to the book, like a mole or a prosthesis. In the process, could one also say something about how the book works, as it moves through its various environments, collecting other growths? I think John Kinsella would appreciate this eco-critical move, for what it ultimately wants to interrogate is the way the book sustains its life. And then, having confessed to that vitalist position, may I go on to ask what the book has to say about Life? Why not tackle the big issue, the writer’s vision?

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He polished his car to a shine, he kept
a ‘clean machine’ inside and out, but down
from ‘up north’, the red dirt would stay
in the seams of doors, around the fittings.
A detailing of distance. A truth unto itself ...

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Biographies, exhaustively researched, can take years, even decades to write – Jill Roe’s recent life of Miles Franklin is a good example – but few have to wait a century for a publisher. Written in 1906 and sold as a handwritten manuscript to the Mitchell Library in 1926, Cyril (brother of Gerard Manley) Hopkins’s obscure ‘Biographical Notice of the Life & Work of Marcus Clarke’ is published for the first time this month as Cyril Hopkins’s Marcus Clarke (Australian Scholarly Publishing).

Drawing on Clarke’s early journalism, Hopkins’s memories of Clarke from their time as schoolboy intimates in England, and the pair’s decades-long correspondence after Clarke’s emigration to Australia in 1863, this volume provides an unprecedented glimpse of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life. It is laced with anecdotal riches, including Clarke’s habit of depositing his unfinished cigars in the mouth of a green metal lion as he entered the Melbourne Public Library. The lion, smoking the cigar, became a signal to his friends that Marcus was within.

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When Petrus Borel led Victor Hugo’s private ‘claque’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himself between the Romantic shock troops (in part driven by the compulsions of the Petit Cénacle) and the classicist critics who panned the play and all it stood for in the press the next day. The performance and the attendant conflicts became known as ‘La Bataille D’Hernani’.

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The publication of John Kinsella’s The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is a major event in Australian poetry. It offers a powerful, large-scale vision of Australia and its poetry. Reading Kinsella’s anthology during the great southern heat-wave of 2009 (before the week of Black Saturday), my understanding of both things became coloured by their accidental intersection. On the second night of the heatwave, Australian poetry buzzing in my head, I took my dog outside for his usual night-time wander around the front yard. The suburban streets were deserted, as they had been in the scorching heat of the day. But at night, this desertion, coupled with the unusual nocturnal heat, gave the suburb an uncanny quality, simultaneously familiar and strange. The only human sounds were the ghostly hum of air conditioners and, in the distance, the mournful noise of someone bringing in a wheelie bin.

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