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Thomas Shapcott

This book, researched, written, and published in the United States, fulfils an immediate Australian need. Sweat on that you local academics, publishers, and timid promoters of the Oz product. It is called ‘A guide to information sources’, which makes it sound very ‘Australian Literary Studies’, but in fact it is an eminently readable, browsable volume.

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Underneath everything we touch is the smell
Of something too obvious to express
And yet we say there is nothing, nothing at all.

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What is it about laughter that makes us lift
As if the burden might be gone or the weight
Be somehow alleviated? Laughter is just noise.

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Tom Shapcott’s most recent volume collects nine short stories and one novella from 1997 to 2005, the period during which he was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Of his thirty-two volumes, eleven are novels, three are collections of short stories, and eighteen are books of poetry. Tom has received the Patrick White Prize, Senior Fellowships from the Australia Council and an Order of Australia. He has been Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Executive Director of the National Book Council and a member of the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week Committee. Does the man never sleep?

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Parts of Us by Thomas Shapcott

by
April 2010, no. 320

This is Tom Shapcott’s thirteenth individual collection of poetry (two Selected Poems have appeared, in 1978 and 1989) in a writing life that – at least for his readers – began with the publication of Time on Fire in 1961. It continues something of a late poetic flowering, which, to my critical mind, began with The City of Home in 1995. All in all, Parts of Us is no disgrace to its twelve predecessors.

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Wait. Sometimes the waiting seems interminable
But that is the trick with water. The dark
Gathers up your apprehension and you seek ...

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Only the young can wholeheartedly love ancient music.
It is fancy-dress, sound pared to its bones
As if the naughty flesh were simply the prop
for the idea of fabulous costumes, or sackcloth and ashes
Such as we never dream of today.

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If we keep hearing about our famous expatriates, the Greers and Jameses and Hugheses and the like, it is because they have made it their business to ensure we do. Gone but not forgotten. Others such as Randolph Stow or Alan Seymour were less busy at self-promotion. But Ray Mathew was a mere rumour. You saw his books here and there in the antiquarian bookshops, especially the short stories, A Bohemian Affair (1961), and the joint collection with Mena Abdullah, Time of the Peacock (1965). Some of his plays were eventually gathered into representative collections. Mathew himself seemed to disappear into thin air. Tom Shapcott’s project is to retrieve a writer he believes we should have paid more heed to.

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These are the final lines of a poem entitled ‘Endings 111’ in Tom Shapcott’s recently published collection of poetry, The City of Empty Rooms. The poem is included in the final two sections of the book devoted to memories of a Queensland childhood, more particularly recollections of growing up in the inland town of Ipswich. As David Malouf suggests in the blurb, ‘this is a late book that sometimes sharply, sometimes forgivingly looks back, but always with the freshness of things felt and seen anew in a living present’.

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Spirit Wrestlers takes its title from ‘Doukhobors’, the name adopted by a strict religious sect that originated in Russia and that was harshly repressed both by the tsarist state and the church. The Society of Friends, attracted by the Doukhobors’ pacifist beliefs and by their prayer meetings, which reject liturgy ...

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