AustLit

'The theme of this issue, Mixed Messages, relates in the main to a thread running through the essays, all of which engage with texts that challenge the limits of genre. These challenges include the status and influence of what might be termed a secondary genre deployed by writers whose renown is based on another form: Brigitta Olubas considers the short fiction of novelist Shirley Hazzard; and Cheryl Taylor introduces the poetry of novelist Thea Astley. Kate Livett delves into the mixed media, specifically music and photography, at the core of Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, and Peter Kirkpatrick examines the fusion of Gothic and Romance forms in Chloe Hooper’s The Engagement, and David Brooks thinks through the miscenegy of the human and the non-human in relation to the famous scene of Derrida standing naked before his cat. Another strand in the issue is of comedy and errors and includes fiction by Debra Adelaide, John Kinsella, Mark Macrossan, Sara Bucholz, Nasrin Mahoutchi, Niki Tulk and Scott McCulloch. The poetry spans its usual wide range from the lyric to graphic experimentation and the reviews introduce some of the exciting new work published across creative and critical forms.' (Publication abstract)

'‘Sacredly Profane has all the outstanding qualities of Kevin Densley’s previous collections - sparky lyricism, revealing jaunts down the byways of history, an abiding fascination with overlapping high and low cultures - but also a new, and strangely timely, element: deep, resonant pathos. Readers can still find sea-horses delicate as embryos, dreamy girlfriends naked in Arcady and childhood athletes shattered like meringues, but also the erasure of families from a bleak landscape (“There is nothing but shifting sand”) and, in a major sequence on the Great War, Percy Black “of the handlebar moustache, chiselled jaw, dark wavy hair and barrel chest” and gunshot wounds, gas attacks and letters that stop, forever. It is a turn which only deepens and enhances those other elements.

'Densley’s work makes us stand back and look at our assumptions about life, art and the politics of them both.  What really motivates the corrupt local mayor to stand on a podium, flexing a copy of a poetry magazine on launch day at the suburban university? Where else would a child feel the fleeting pull of holy yellow light but St Matthew’s Anglican Church, East Geelong? And who but great-great grandfather William, breeder of prize-winning hens and roosters, could brood from a century-old wedding photograph without donning a tie, and wearing shoes that could do with a polish? Nothing in Sacredly Profane provides the answers, but then nothing should. Instead, let the lines spin out and the words pick up their marvellous, higgledy dance, till they leave you on the far shore more desolate than in earlier days, but also more hopeful gasping and reeling and pop-eyed with gratitude.’ - James Roderick Burns, Other Poetry /, Author of The Worksongs of the Worms.' (Publication summary)