Kerryn Goldsworthy
Hecate vol. 30, no. 2 edited by Carole Ferrier & Island 99 edited by David Owen
What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.
... (read more)Griffith Review 15: Divided Nation edited by Julianne Schultz
I has sworn, in my editorial capacity, not to reinforce or allow to be reinforced, by word or deed, the old Sydney vs. Melbourne scenario in the pages of this magazine; but I realised very quickly that this was a case of one’s reach exceeding one’s grasp. The construction of this inter-city relationship as ‘St Petersburg or Tinsel Town?’, with its suggestion of two (and only two) opposing superpowers and its implication that one must make the choice, has – however you might feel about it – an imaginative force before which one can only bow. Several recent items in ABR have drawn on the two cities’ perceived differences in order to make points about the books or ideas under discussion (see, for instance, Rob Pascoe’s review of Frederic Eggleston and Intellectual Suppression in this issue); Jim Davidson has produced The Sydney Melbourne Book as heralded in last month’s ‘Starters & Writers’; the ‘opposition’ model seems to be a powerful figure in the national literary rhetoric.
... (read more)