UQP

Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.

John Clancy does a number of curious things in his new novel. One of them is to put Patrick White’s Voss into the hands of his heroine. Laura is in Year 12. Her teacher, Miss Temple, happens to find a copy of Voss when they are together on a school excursion to Alice Springs. Laura immediately warms to the book. She is a remarkable young woman, sensitive and resourceful. Destined to study medicine, she has literary gifts as well. People offer her jobs at places where others her age are queuing for work. One of her reasons for going on the school excursion, where she helps supervise a group of Year 7 and 8 children, is that she is recovering from the termination of her relationship with Patrick, her slightly older beau.

Anthony Lawrence’s latest collection of poetry, Skinned by Light: Poems 1989–2002, a revision of his New and Selected (1998), is a much tighter work than its predecessor – 121 as against 335 pages. While some may wonder why UQP has published another ‘Selected’ from Lawrence in the space of four years, the publication of his novel, In the Half Light (2000), justifies introducing Lawrence’s poetry to a wider readership.

Somewhere within this idea of things there lurks the soul of a brick veneer, and being a poet in these late capitalist times is like using an hour glass rather than a digital watch ... Look at all these things in this overstuffed city. And out on the perimeters, Neighbourhood Watch saves another VCR!