AustLit

'‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky -,’ wrote Emily Dickinson revealing our capacity to expand our mind beyond experience to imagination. Acclaimed American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson recently recapped this magical opening of the mind that comes with reading when she wrote an article describing what it’s like for an author trying to find the right word. I was reminded of this image again when delving into a new collection of short stories from Australian writer and academic Catherine Cole. In diverse and joyful ways Robinson and Cole remind me of what I love about reading (and writing), of what I learn from books through that open invitation to go beyond a closed door, to find my way around the darkness and relish the light that shines through even the saddest of stories.' (Introduction)

'To find a collection of short stories so perfectly themed as The Circle and the Equator is a rare gift. These stories take us on a grand tour of the world, shifting in time, with each location bound to an historical event, often a violent one. They explore the lives of ordinary people confronted by extraordinary moments in history. The stories are in no discernible order with the first being set in 1978 Angola, the second in Berlin in 1921, the third in Hiroshima in 1952, and so on. However, what links them is an expression of often indifferent and random violence, sometimes because of conflict and war, and the aftermath this has on these people’s lives.' (Introduction)

'“I peeled apples and sliced them finger-nail deep, waking you with their scent” (1): Jen Webb’s Sentences from the Archive (Recent Work Press, 2016) begins with the pastel erotic vignette ‘Outside the Orchard’. It’s like a favourite private memory that gets indulgently recycled from time to time. “The astringent bite. Fluid in the mouth. Green skin, spiralling a green S across the lawn.” (1) But by the third poem ‘The heart of the sea’, the green is muddied, the tone becomes urgent, and the murmur of inner experience is abandoned for a collective voice: “The navy arrived in fast boats, urging us to board, guaranteeing our lives….” (3) The tense shifts midpoint to a present which seems to express a kind of futility, like the futility of prediction: “Tonight we wait, hand in hand, standing on the deck. In the distance we see it draw nearer. I think that it’s a rainstorm, but someone says no, it’s angels. Someone else says it is the herald of our end.” (3)' (Introduction)

'Luke Fischer’s second collection,  A Personal History of Vision, published earlier this year in UWAP’s Poetry Series, firmly establishes him as a pyrotechnician of language. This is Fischer’s second collection, and like the first, which was commended in the Anne Elder Award, it brings a dazzling range and depth of experience to his writing. Fischer’s ‘Augury?’, included in Paths of Flight, won the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Prize. Fischer is also a scholar of Romanticism, and this informs his poetry in unexpected and delightful ways. He has learned from Rainer Maria Rilke that an attentiveness to language enhances our understanding of things and therefore intensifies our vision. Like Rilke, his purpose is ‘to say [words] more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of being’.  In that, he goes further than Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, in his Treatise on Logic, famously wrote: ‘it is words, names, or, if images used as words or names, that are the only and exclusive subject of understanding. In no instance do we understand a thing in itself’. ' (Introduction)

'‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within.  This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what we remember,” which is then challenged and amended through Rolfe’s poetic interrogation in four sections. This poem introduces the settings—“coastlines and beaches / clearings and trails”—recurring through the collection, and the illusion of coherency, dependent on forgetting incongruities. It sets up the speaker and the addressee, their edited and untethered beings. Memory becomes “a range of values / not definitive states,” contemporary, relational, amendable, and always bittersweet. “They say we’re plural, post-memory / too old not to know / we should be playing what when / instead of / what if.’'  (Introduction)

'There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthologyContemporary Feminist Poetry, there is:

…a subtle, cresting sense of activism.'   (Introduction)

'Preparations for Departure, Nathanael O’Reilly’s second full length collection, is an ongoing journey in which the poet enters the gaps between home and abroad, contentment and discontent, presence and absence, youth and age, the past and the present. These disparities emerge in a suite of fifty-nine free-verse poems spanning across his formative years growing up in small town Australia, to his most recent years living in America. Reflecting a life spent in diaspora, the poems transport the reader back and forth across oceans to land in cities of ruinous decay, preserved in the poet’s mind; to scenes of quiet urbanity and the endlessly silent screams which pervade; to beaches untrodden, and in which we may now see our footprints forever imprinted; the clatter and squalor of marketplaces and the drudgery of the quotidian. A constantly shifting collage of antonymous sights and sounds, these duopolies are best observed in the author’s mind.'   (Introduction)

'Ben Lerner in his 2016 essay “The Hatred of Poetry” reminds us of poetry’s activist, historical participation in politics; “Plato, in the most influential attack on poetry in recorded history, concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because poets are rhetoricians who pass off imaginative projections as the truth and risk corrupting citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth.” Sydney poet, Amelia Dale, has taken Australian poetic political agitation to a new level, with her new book, Constitution.' (Introduction)

'It is at these boundaries, the rough torn edges of art and artist that we understand our subjects best. A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan is a remarkably shrewd study of Garner’s work knitted with a tender representation of her personal life. Brennan dives into the murky grey depths that separate ‘literary critique’ and ‘biography,’ choosing instead the more ambiguous denomination of ‘literary portrait.’ This bifurcation of sub-genres might seem like literary posturing; such distinctions are often made by marketing teams as opposed to the author themself. However the language we use to segment books into genre is significant for readers and thus important to authors in terms of distribution and readership.'   (Introduction)