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Maria Takolander

Hold the hearts close to your heart:
they’ll feed each other blooms of colour

and the nudity of shapes
until you are bursting

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Westerly vol. 50, November 2005 edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell & Australian Literary Studies vol. 22, no. 2, 2005 edited by Anne Pender and Leigh Dale

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March 2006, no. 279

As an academic teaching in literary studies, I regularly feel compelled to justify my job, particularly in the light of dwindling enrolments. Literary journals and the writers who feature in them, judging by the latest issue of Westerly, also feel pressure to defend their relevance, primarily due to their small audiences. Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, in an editorial commemorating fifty years of Westerly, pay tribute to the ‘creative and intellectual enthusiasm’ that drives the journal and celebrate its survival in a culture they believe is becoming increasingly visually, rather than verbally, literate. Tracy Ryan, one of the contributors, alludes to a different obstacle: public resentment. Her poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ summarises public attitudes to writers: ‘Narcissism, egotism, think the world owes you a living, / God’s gift.’ What to do in the face of such indifference and even dislike?

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I’ve had disturbing encounters with literature and film before: Reinaldo Arenas’s The Color of Summer (2000) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Their unsettling nature lies in the ways in which they link sex and violence, and show their hooks in the political body and the (masculine) soul. Against oppressive régimes (whether socialist or capitalist), these texts engage in ambiguous defences of instincts that aren’t much prettier than the systems against which their anti-heroes rail.

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Ventriloquist’s Dummy
Jennifer Harrison

I

          I can’t tell where I’m going
but shall I memorise the shape of streets
          the slope of bridges, the vertigo?
today I’m carried somewhere new –
I’m lost, in pieces, and I rattle

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Another by Joel Deane & After Moonlight by Merle Thornton

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March 2005, no. 269

These first novels by Joel Deane, the Victorian premier’s speechwriter, and Merle Thornton, a former academic who famously chained herself to a male-only bar in Brisbane, focus on radically different social groups. Deane’s Another is about two unemployed adolescents living in an outer Melbourne suburb bypassed by a freeway where the local McDonalds is the town’s nucleus. In After Moonlight, Thornton presents a bookstore-browsing, duck-eating, macchiato-sipping, Carltonish academic. (The novel is replete with such portmanteaux.) That both novels are set in the same city is a shock. Another commonality, more poignant, is a concern with the personal and the enduring effects of tragic pasts.

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Avenues & Runways by Aidan Coleman & Throwing Stones at the Sun by Cameron Lowe

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December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

Each of these three books is its author’s first, and each carries a cover endorsement by two distinguished poets. You can tell a lot about the books from looking at who endorses whom before you need even to read one of the poems.

The rear cover of Aidan Coleman’s Avenues & Runways (endorsements by Kevin Hart and Peter Goldsworthy) describes him as an imagist. Whatever the exact significance of that term, there is no doubt that this poetry belongs to the class that has slight outward show and rich implications. And the pleasure of reading them is the shuttling between the two. There are at least two important requirements here: the surface has to be elegant and engaging without being slovenly or cute (ah, if you only knew what treasures I conceal!); implications must be intense and never clichéd.

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(for David)

 

je ne sais quoi
but it is written in the sound of this melange
of consonants and vowels that a blind
old impressionist defeats Duchamp

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