There’s something about country towns that makes them peculiarly well suited to being described in short stories. Or is it that short stories are particularly suited to describe life in country towns? Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor wrote about little else, and several Australian writers’ best books have been collections of stories set in country towns: Olga Masters’ A Long Time Dying, for example, and Frank Moorhouse’s The Electrical Experience. Gillian Mears’s Fineflour is a work which may be placed with absolute confidence beside any of those mentioned above.

My acid test of a good novel is how long the characters reverberate in the consciousness after the book has been put down. After I read both these books, I carried Grace Starr and Steven Messenger around in my head for weeks – both of them dangerous and mysterious persons, but in very different ways.

In Nights with Grace, Rosie Scott has once again demonstrated her ability to convey the subtle essence of femaleness, writing about women with the same honesty and understanding she showed in Glory Days. Grace Starr’s dreamily emerging seventeen-year-old sensuality is echoed by the voluptuous tropical vegetation of the island of Rarotonga and the spectacular, sex-and-sherry sodden decay of her mother Mara, whose beauty rots even as Grace’s blooms. The images of heat, wetness, secret underground processes, lush flowering and dank decomposition create a rich setting for Grace’s bitter-sweet progress in self-discovery:

... she was preoccupied with monitoring herself, listening for signs, she heard voices, her blood singing in her veins, the quiet formation of intricate tender structures going on inside her.

Scott has a gift for describing sensation and emotion in a way that captures all the intensity of the moment:

She kept thinking of him in images unbearably sweetened by loss, his warm body weighing on her, the salty smell of his skin, his eyes swollen with love as he lay sprawled beside her, punch-drunk with sex. She thought of the way they used to talk all through the night sometimes, lying in the dark with their eyes ahead like two schoolkids, speaking in soft voices of old painful things, ruminating, trying out their living history on each other in the safe dark.

This collection of poetry is similarly accommodating. It is shaped by four quite different tonal movements: ‘All Blues’ (eight lyrics closely observing the ‘still life’ within season, art-work, society and self), ‘Trans-Europe Express’ (a travelogue of past times and places where conscious reflection momentarily counters the movement and cross-currents of historical process), ‘Dogs’ (where Diogenes’ cynicism is invoked to ‘lower the tone’, reminding me of the blues singer’s injunction to ‘laugh just to keep from crying’) and ‘More Blues’ (where episodic vistas of ‘blue hills’ unfold from Tailem Bend to Mount Segur). The collection ends with a nine-part retrospective called ‘The Front’ which is partly about the art of making poetry or music in the face of ‘prevailing imagery’. Here a littoral between performance and reputation is reached as today’s determined play with a language is set against inherited ‘fixed ideas’. But poetry, that stuff sometimes beached but rarely buried, rises again to have its say in a different way:

Deep and dissolving verticals of light
submerge alliteration in a shallow tub
              of salt, weed, and jetsam,
and the new mob shine
with bastard smiles and kind hearts,
so that we are thrown back on these
       baleful; decorations, unable
to show us how to cross the road, ined-
       ible
finally a confused wrack
in which we sink or swim.

This collection is an eclectic one. John A. Scott includes translations from Apollinaire, Ovid, John Clare (a translation from prose) and a little-known contemporary French poet by the name of Emmanuel Hocquard, together with a selection of his own work. This at first dauntingly disparate group appears to be united by the myth of Apollo’s son Orpheus in which creativity and the absence of the beloved are inextricably entwined (‘I come here for Eurydice, whose absence / filled my life – and more – could not contain’). Another aspect of this myth important to Scott is represented by Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell, in which spiritual suffering and occult experience are vital elements of artistic creation. Transposed to a more mundane level, this suffering is nothing more than frustrated sexual desire, a condition frequently evoked by the poet in this collection and one that finds eloquent expression in his translation of Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’:

You suffered from love at twenty and
                             thirty
I have lived like a madman and I
                             have wasted my time
You no longer dare look at your
                             hands at every
               moment I could weep
Over you over her whom I love over
                             everything
               which has frightened you