Why do you write?

I feel deeply alive when I am being creative, despite the frustrations. I love the challenge of trying to find the right words and turning language into song.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Some of my dream landscapes have been both the most exquisitely beautiful and the most terrifying places I have ever seen. But mostly my dreams are common anxiety ones about snakes and being naked in public.

Uneven realities

Nigel Pearn

The elasticity of fiction, the ‘what if’ – in other words, the genre’s very virtues and interests – are often the characteristics that alienate ‘sensible’ readers. To the literal-minded, literature can present as a self-defeating puzzle. All that pretence is exhausting, irrelevant at best, or, drawing a long line from the Ancient Greeks, morally bankrupt. ‘I don’t read fiction anymore,’ Everyman says (and most often it is a man): ‘thank goodness for non-fiction, for plain speech, for things as they truly are.’

Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervades these two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain (author of four novels, including Closed for Winter, 1998), and a début book, This is Shyness by Leanne Hall, trace the aftermath of events in which brightness gives way to ‘sudden black’ in the lives of teenage characters.

Poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh’s third book of poetry, Ashes in the Air, reclaims some themes from his earlier poetry collection, Eyes in Times of War (2006). Autobiographical sequences once again interweave with accounts of recent wars and oppression. Alizadeh also explores some conflicting oppositions: neutrality versus partisanship, faith versus scepticism, individualism versus community. Alizadeh travels to the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and China, and recalls his native Iran, but travel here is both actual and metaphysical. Ashes in the Air commences with ‘Marco Polo’, which hails the birth of his son, and closes with ‘Staph’, an elegy. Poet Louis Armand describes Alizadeh’s work as ‘a poetry ... of what it means for a language to speak truthfully, to witness or to fabricate’, and many poems further illustrate how language shapes and transforms identity. As with other Australian poets such as Ouyang Yu who write in their second language, sameness and difference are presiding concerns in Alizadeh’s work, even humorously so when the carnivorous poet marries a vegetarian. Critically alert to ideas of otherness and its adjoining preconceptions – ‘Speak English! / Say something, camel fucker!’ (‘Sky Burial’) – he questions what identity without language might mean.