In a recent interview, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli confessed that the book he would most like to be remembered for is The Order of Time (2018), a work in which time, as it is commonly understood, ‘melts [like a snowflake] between your fingers and vanishes’. The Order of Time, Rovelli admits, only pretends to be about physics. Ultimately, it’s a book about the meaning of life and the complexity of being human.

Rovelli has never shied away from acknowledging, even revelling in, the philosophical questions and unanswered mysteries that continue to emerge at the cutting edge of science. As he writes in There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, ‘a science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile’.

Poor old Sydney. If it isn’t being described as crass and culturally superficial, it’s being condemned for allowing developers to obliterate whatever natural beauty it ever had. Is it doomed, will it survive, and if so, what kind of city is it likely to be?

Elizabeth Farrelly is here to provide answers to these and other questions. An architect, former City of Sydney Councillor, and tertiary teacher, she is probably most widely known as the Sydney Morning Herald ’s writer on civic architecture. Her new book echoes much of her recent journalism: Sydney is being murdered. Its fabric, she asserts, is being destroyed by self-interested and inadequate governance, corruption, haste, and lack of proper planning.

Commissioning deities:                      Aphrodite, Adonis, Gaia, Venus

Topic:                                                  Beauty

Scope:                                                 Internal audit

Auditor name:                                   Φαιδρα (Phaedra)

Auditor registration number:         ͵δφξζ

Audit site:                                          Addison St, Elwood, Victoria, Australia

                                                           Avenue measures είκοσι δύο schoinions

Date:                                                 ζʹ moon waning,͵βκ

Notes:                                                Local numbering and sacred references

Key findings:

School sing-song wisps, plane trees frame powerline peril,
ribs smeared salmon and taupe to the apse. Driveways
bloom yards – uncombed jasmine at 93, roses clipped to fists,
fringed birch, spots of cumquat. Leonine sentries kiss camellias
pink, snow, arterial red; flocks of magnolia plead mercy and chant
novenas for poplar bones. Cruciform canal, swollen with sticks
and storms; hunched sentries tear bread, toddlers lob offerings –
spoonbill, heron, teal. Crossed by Shelley Street, freesias waft
to the uncoupled. Waterside, a baker dances in her driveway,
paints palings – I still love you, comical fish. Pickets woo
violets, homes claim names … Santa Fe, the tulip fretwork
of Ashfel, Rappelle’s sasanqua. A handful of banana palms
play, tawny eyes spy tabernacled pigeons; trouser legs watch
first-act baths, tea steams a bolted bench. Rainbow gates
at 13, swings on the verge – tyre and rope, plank and nylon –
Hebe’s brood insided. Baskets freckled purple at 7, terracotta
warms silver-eye and bird-of-paradise agree with soft winds.
Lorikeets hide in velvet-gloved gum, father-of-the-bride magpies
strut and ivy pretends to flee, one tendril at a time. Blossom
clots branches, a southerly tickles pregnant jacaranda,
nasturtiums unperturbed. At 58, a citrus circus teases would-be
thieves and cooks; eternally bogged, a wheelbarrow brims parsley
and rosemary twists for Priapos. Limbs buttress nests, tail feathers
pause … a lyre unsheathed, choristers perch on Addison’s bridge.

Escalation/s: N/A

Recommendation:

Site meets acceptable aesthetic standard: (Cross appropriate box)

☒ Strongly agree       ☐ Agree      ☐ Neutral      ☐ Disagree      ☐ Strongly disagree

OFFICE USE ONLY

Report in Calliope-endorsed format                          ☐ Yes     ☐ No

Appropriate escalations/recommendation                  ☐ Yes      ☐ No

Dislocations is a product of the Irish diaspora. Its editor is a Western Australian who claims his Irish heritage from Carlow and Wicklow; its subject was brought up on the border between counties Armagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland, and emigrated to the United States in 1987. There is, then, a biographical precedent for John Kinsella’s sharp characterisation of Paul Muldoon’s work as ‘a liminal poetry that lives both sides of any given border … in an ongoing state of visitation with its roots in linguistic and cultural reassurance’.

While Dislocations is advanced tentatively as a ‘selected innovative poems’ (a dicey editorial enterprise for an oeuvre like Muldoon’s, which, in Kinsella’s words, is ‘always experimental, even when the work is more readily accessible’), the book’s rationale becomes clearest when considered in light of Kinsella’s critical writings on international regionalism and ‘polysituatedness’. These writings think of our relation to place as not just a function of ‘where we are, but [also] where we have been and where we can perceive ourselves as having been, or imagine ourselves being’. The idea of ‘home’ thus becomes a palimpsest of past and present habitations, real and ideal modes of belonging. For Kinsella, it is Muldoon’s verse vagabondage through the thorny linguistic, historical, and mythological borderlands of his two homes that best captures this ‘multi-layered and cumulative picture of place’. Not just ‘the prince of the quotidian’, Kinsella’s Muldoon is the laureate of polysituatedness.