Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content
Absolutely Revolting

June 1986, no. 81

Free Article: No
Contents Category: Poetry
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: The Virtues of Simplicity... and one cryptic overgrowth
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Here we have poetry by five women. The most artful, Patricia Avery, her motifs glass, ice, crystal, reflections, mirrors, water, waves, ocean, I find obscure. In absolute contrast is the work of Susan Schwartz, simply expressed, crystal clear, yet subtle, and full of striking images.
Book 1 Title: The Unborn Child Speaks To The Sea
Book Author: Susan Schwartz
Book 1 Biblio: Abalone Press, PO Box 202 Cheltenham Victoria, 76p., $7.95
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Heritage Of Air
Book 2 Author: Madge Staunton
Book 2 Biblio: Queensland Community Press, 49p.
Book 2 Author Type: Author
Book 3 Title: Other People (And Other Poems)
Book 3 Author: Elly McDonald
Book 3 Biblio: Published by the author, PO Box 123 0, Potts Point 2011 NSW, 60p., $5.00 pb
Book 3 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

Here we have poetry by five women. The most artful, Patricia Avery, her motifs glass, ice, crystal, reflections, mirrors, water, waves, ocean, I find obscure. In absolute contrast is the work of Susan Schwartz, simply expressed, crystal clear, yet subtle, and full of striking images.

These are the poems of a woman for the time being engrossed in the care of her family, realising how fast her young years slip away. The family is at the centre of more than half; the rest are portraits, landscapes, political satires, intelligent, assured. Let no one think she has sunk into motherhood like a featherbed. The sequence The Unborn ChildSpeaks to the Sea, which gives the book its title, is honest, tender, objective, triumphant, as it follows the first realisations of pregnancy from instinctive recoil to joyful acceptance, and the title poem, which has already found its way into an anthology for children, one would like to quote in full if space allowed. The consciousness is the child’s, a whale in her mother’s belly, ocean within ocean, as her mother swims.

Read more: Barbara Giles reviews 5 poetry collections

Write comment (0 Comments)
Jane Cotter reviews three poetry collections
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Poetry
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: The Delicately Lighted Angle
Article Subtitle: Good faith towards the language
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

With issues 101 and 102 (Renewing Dialects: New Poetry from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Poetry Australia has entered upon the estate of the sage organ. The two issues account fairly representatively for PA’s traditional function – to provide opportunity, a periodic review of contemporary poetic activity, and a reliable voice. Herbert Jaffa leads off 101 with ‘Poetry Australia at One Hundred: An Impression and Appreciation’, a tribute to PA as source material and as a place of opportunity for the newish and oldish poet; and Elizabeth Perkins closes the show with a review essay of its special issues since 1968 (up to, but not including, 102). This essay cogently reminds poets and readers of a basic requirement: that poets keep ‘good faith towards the language they use’. An editor could do worse than start with such a requirement. Both 101 and 102 are clearly open to the possibilities of ‘new’ languages, and alternatives to the sort of ‘I’ catalogue of micromoments that so often puts new readers off. Shifting of the ‘I’ shuffles up some interesting versions of tone.
Book 1 Title: Poetry Australia No. 101
Book Author: Grace Perry
Book 1 Biblio: South Head Press, $30.00 (Annual Subscription), 80 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 2 Title: Poetry Australia No. 102
Book 2 Author: Paul Kavanagh
Book 2 Biblio: South Head Press, $30.00 (Annual Subscription), 96 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Editor
Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):
Book 3 Title: The Solitary Islands
Book 3 Author: Audrey Longbottom
Book 3 Biblio: Ollif Publishing Company, $7.00 pb, 62 pp
Book 3 Author Type: Author
Book 3 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 3 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

With issues 101 and 102 (Renewing Dialects: New Poetry from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Poetry Australia has entered upon the estate of the sage organ. The two issues account fairly representatively for PA’s traditional function – to provide opportunity, a periodic review of contemporary poetic activity, and a reliable voice. Herbert Jaffa leads off 101 with ‘Poetry Australia at One Hundred: An Impression and Appreciation’, a tribute to PA as source material and as a place of opportunity for the newish and oldish poet; and Elizabeth Perkins closes the show with a review essay of its special issues since 1968 (up to, but not including, 102). This essay cogently reminds poets and readers of a basic requirement: that poets keep ‘good faith towards the language they use’. An editor could do worse than start with such a requirement. Both 101 and 102 are clearly open to the possibilities of ‘new’ languages, and alternatives to the sort of ‘I’ catalogue of micromoments that so often puts new readers off. Shifting of the ‘I’ shuffles up some interesting versions of tone.

In 101 there’s some fun – tiny punnic reminders like Peter Bibby’s ‘Foot­note’, S. G. Evans’s ‘The Pink Shoes’; gaily self-contained parables which evolve their own languages – Lynne Alvarez’s ‘Dog and Hermit Crab’, and another ‘opus’ from Krzysztof Ostaszewski about two zebras. The star of Jesse Lee Kercheval’s ‘Le Grand Hotel’ poems is the proprietaire Madame Desnos, whose ‘hair is the faded red/of a very old dachsund’. His patient control of Madame Desnos coaxes out a poignant humour, and obviously owes something to the lineage of slow dramatic gesture. Less fun, more vitriol in Catalano’s ‘Roman Imitations’, with its vicelike tone; and two Dawesian pieces from Bruce, sticking up for the voiceless: ‘Malingering’s a style like any other ... ’

Read more: Jane Cotter reviews three poetry collections

Write comment (0 Comments)
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Commentary
Review Article: No
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Starters & Writers
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

The Australian Bookseller & Publisher serves as the trade magazine for the Australian publishing and bookselling industry. It derives a substantial amount of its revenue from the advertisements that publishers place in it.
Display Review Rating: No

The Australian Bookseller & Publisher serves as the trade magazine for the Australian publishing and bookselling industry. It derives a substantial amount of its revenue from the advertisements that publishers place in it.

Read more: 'Starters & Writers' by Mark Rubbo

Write comment (0 Comments)
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Essay
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Self Portrait
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Writing fiction is something I originally stumbled upon rather than consciously chose. Much the same can be said of my career as student and university teacher. Brought up in London in a lower working-class family, I certainly harboured no intellectual or literary ambitions. Like the rest of my family, I looked forward only to escaping from school as soon as possible and settling down to a steady job. What challenged that way of thinking was my parents’ unexpected decision to go to Northern Rhodesia (as it was then) when I was fifteen. Central Africa, where I was to spend a good portion of the next twenty years, did more to alter my attitudes and prospects than anything before or since. Still under British rule, it showed me the last and perhaps the ugliest face of colonialism; and in so doing destroyed any smug sense I may have had of my own Englishness. Equally, the politics of an emerging Zambia taught me some painful and abrupt lessons about both myself and the twentieth century preoccupation with violence. 
Display Review Rating: No

Writing fiction is something I originally stumbled upon rather than consciously chose. Much the same can be said of my career as student and university teacher. Brought up in London in a lower working-class family, I certainly harboured no intellectual or literary ambitions. Like the rest of my family, I looked forward only to escaping from school as soon as possible and settling down to a steady job. What challenged that way of thinking was my parents’ unexpected decision to go to Northern Rhodesia (as it was then) when I was fifteen. Central Africa, where I was to spend a good portion of the next twenty years, did more to alter my attitudes and prospects than anything before or since. Still under British rule, it showed me the last and perhaps the ugliest face of colonialism; and in so doing destroyed any smug sense I may have had of my own Englishness. Equally, the politics of an emerging Zambia taught me some painful and abrupt lessons about both myself and the twentieth century preoccupation with violence.

As an indirect result of those lessons, I took what in my family was the unprecedented step of attending university. At the time, I wasn’t motivated by any love of learning. I was simply on the run from what I’d come to regard as a white man’s army. Having decided early on that under no conditions would I do my compulsory military service, I had already spent some years evading the call-up – going ‘bush’, disappearing on protracted hitchhiking trips, changing jobs, even moving from country to country. When all else failed, I turned to university as a last resort!

In my circumstances (limited money, etc.) that meant heading south, to the University of Natal. Oddly enough, to flee from a British to a South African administration was not as contradictory as it may sound. English-speaking South African universities were and still are fairly radical places: and the University of Natal added to my education in more than just a formal sense. Not last, it put me in the company of young people who were as appalled as I was by racism and current white attitudes; and also convinced me that there were other options apart from running.

Read more: Self Portrait - Victor Kelleher

Write comment (0 Comments)
John McLaren reviews The Ear in the Wheatfield edited by Kris Hemensley
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Anthology
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

The everlasting dance of sounds and feelings and colours, the taste and scent of life, comes to us in its most explicit form in words. Even when Proust’s famous Madeleine led him back through its scents and associations in search of a time that was lost, he followed its tracks through words that brought back the images of the past and tied them down into clear grammatical patterns of form and relationship. Because language teaches us how to think and feel and see it is always political. The speaker and the writer impose on us patterns which either reinforce or subvert established power. It is no accident that a failed conservative businessman and politician has been able to recover his fortunes by writing a political thriller, or that Mrs Thatcher has now engaged him on the task of selling her politics of destruction to a wary electorate. The words create the reality.
Book 1 Title: The Ear in the Wheatfield
Book 1 Subtitle: A Portrait of a Magazine
Book Author: Kris Hemensley
Book 1 Biblio: Rigmarole Books, 255p., contributors’ index, $11. 95 pb 0 909229 29 5
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Display Review Rating: No

The everlasting dance of sounds and feelings and colours, the taste and scent of life, comes to us in its most explicit form in words. Even when Proust’s famous Madeleine led him back through its scents and associations in search of a time that was lost, he followed its tracks through words that brought back the images of the past and tied them down into clear grammatical patterns of form and relationship. Because language teaches us how to think and feel and see it is always political. The speaker and the writer impose on us patterns which either reinforce or subvert established power. It is no accident that a failed conservative businessman and politician has been able to recover his fortunes by writing a political thriller, or that Mrs Thatcher has now engaged him on the task of selling her politics of destruction to a wary electorate. The words create the reality.

Read more: John McLaren reviews 'The Ear in the Wheatfield' edited by Kris Hemensley

Write comment (0 Comments)

More Articles ...