AustLit

'The Complete Apparition is an existential comedy.

'The Apparition is only there when perceived. Many who may evoke him, mostly fail. When he arrives he has a presence. Or he is there unannounced-in boudoir, viaduct, United Nations or outback, backyard or shopping strip, by mantel-piece, on dancefloor, in the Islands, on flatbed truck-or amongst plants or creatures. Not being there for long, there’s a tear in his eye, a catch in his breath for what will be gone, almost as quickly as him.

'His fractured story embraces both of Tolstoy’s ‘ two plots: a person leaves home; a stranger comes to town.’ No wonder he sings hymn, anthem, rap, popular song, nursery rhyme, bush ballad or an odd sonnet to suggest he is here. So let him contest with the fear, our fear, of fading.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The wildlife officer moves into the woodland,
steps between the crooked carpet of winged

limbs; the stiff cloaks swathing brown bodies.
He looks out at the row upon row of flying

foxes, lifeless or starved to motionlessness;
each reduced to lay at the level of a human heel.'

'The inheritors are those who will suffer the ravages of climate change be they human, creature or plant.'

'The strangest place, this world of fact and figment we astonishingly find ourselves inhabiting, is the territory that Stephen Edgar’s poetry has been probing and framing for over four decades now, looking out on the evanescent representations of light and inwards on the mind and “the gyre of its own consciousness”, feeling “toward the labyrinth just behind Creation’s serene surface”, as Alan Gould described it, and “trying to keep faith poetically with that strangeness of the world”, in the words of Peter Steele.

'The Strangest Place offers a retrospective on Edgar’s career, with selections from each of his previous ten books. Opening the collection is a book-length section of new poems, Background Noise, which continues and extends the range of his meditations, with characteristic technical mastery, interspersed with the title’s leitmotiv, whether the notes of lorikeets in the morning trees, echoing voices in an abandoned railway tunnel, the mind’s running commentary or the cosmic hum beyond the death of the stars.' (Publication summary)

'Leon Piterman weaves many anecdotes about his patients into his critical account of contemporary General Practice. They are not mere case studies but show the compassion which is an element in the make-up of a good doctor as vital as medical training or diagnostic skill. There's a lot of it going around has information, stories and advocacy. It is a book to enjoy and learn from.

'I have often heard it said that whoever is in front of you is your teacher. If reading these fascinating, touching and often humorous tales from general practice is anything to go by, Leon Piterman has accumulated more than a lifetime's wisdom from his patients.

'Associate Professor Craig Hassed OAM

'I loved reading A GP's Odyssey. All doctors and medical students will identify with this precious book from an inspirational GP. It will make you laugh, cry and celebrate the unique and valuable role of the generalist in comprehensive patient care. You will love it too.

'Clinical Professor Leanne Rowe AM

'Sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious the stories in this GP's odyssey are filled with what makes general practice unique-pumpkin scones, family tragedy, those determined to live and the stoic humble elderly coming to terms with their fate. Ever the great educator, Leon Piterman's stories has learnings for us all.

'Professor Danielle Mazza'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

''Two That Got Away' is a novel in five parts, a story set not within, but more on the periphery, of the rock lobster industry. Its principal characters are also peripheral, to society: Rus, a jaded writer/actor turned deckhand, and Possum, a former farmer with psychological problems who has turned to lobster fishing. Rus lives in a cluttered beach cottage, 'The Shack', on Possum's coastal farmland. The beachside location is at Kelpy Point, off which their lobster vessel is moored. A few K's away lies Port Gong, fishing community, its ways a mystery to most city dwellers, its conversations coloured by inventive old-style Aussie vernacular, its attitudes out of sync with contemporary Oz society Like most professional fishing days, 'Two That Got Away' starts at a leisurely pace and then builds. William 'Walrus' Rose, having had a gutful of big city life and of The Arts scene, has made a dinkum sea-change. Setting a course for bluer pastures has seen him drift into this ocean-eroded area, earn a shorter nickname ('Rus'), and find work on the local fleet's smallest lobster boat. For almost two fishing seasons now, off a wild coast, Rus has deckied for eccentric and loveable but psychologically shaky Possum Wright. Despite poor catches, for Rus all has been cruising along okay, encounters with local personalities providing additional, if sometimes edgy, interest. Deep down however, he harbours one major concern: How, despite his obvious sea skills, will Possum react in a real crisis? They are destined to sail into a terrifying situation. Rus is about to find out. The Southern Ocean is a wondrous but challenging workplace. When its waters turn murderous, it is no place to find yourself in a small craft beside a man, far more your mate than your boss, who appears to be losing his mind.' (Publication summary)

'You could buy methedrine ampoules over the counter in Indian chemists, and soon he was injecting her. The needle changed everything. Pure speed, she was riding high, too high, and soon she was completely out of control. She couldn’t get enough, once she doped up via the needle. The methedrine ‘flash’ high, was what it was all about—that timeless, endless, space-out, that floating, mental stillness, eternity in the now. Nothing else came close!
'La Ragazza is a confessional work of fiction—Raffaella Torresan’s central character, La Ragazza (The Girl) can’t settle in to suburban school life so she leaves home at age fifteen and hits the mean streets of the city. She finds it. Sex, drugs, the whole damn thing. The Girl wants to see The World and The Big Bad World loves nothing more than to lead innocence astray. By the time. much much later, when The Girl returns to her origins she has seen the wonderful and terrible sights of the Far Shores, found love and loss, and the wonderful/terrible world of drugs. She has learned to sacrifice everything and everyone—mainly herself—for The Hit. Will the needle eat into her soul? Can she see that The Drug will take everything from you... even life itself?

'Raffaella Torresan has written a compelling story that bleeds truth through the fiction.

'What is real? Only you can decide...' (Publication summary)

'Jennifer Harrison’s Anywhy is exceptional. The depth and lightly carried learning of the author, as we embrace each poem, is startling. We are philosophically shaken. Her title Anywhy may suggest the cool shrug of ‘whatever’ but Harrison’s neologism is a steady-eyed consideration of the world: its ecology, its history, its fragilities and resilience. Her insight is subtle but never vague, inviting our imagination to consider the inner life of birds, the emotive pull of hardware, Emma Hamilton, a reverie at Blackwood Village (from which the title emerges), DNA or Absolute Zero. Above all, it scintillates with human sorrow and human response.' (Publication Summary)

'But there was no canopy of flowers in mid-winter, of course. 
Even the tough, dark-green, pointed leaves appeared to be
unhappy, turning brown on their edges, perhaps drought-stricken.

     'I closed my eyes, hugged my knees, and the little tree was
 in flower again—clouds of apricot-pink blossom, the colour of sunrise,
 and buzzing with thousands of wild honey-bees. I was never afraid
 of the bees. They ignored me, and the dogs.

'The Humming Tree, Memories of an Eccentric Childhood is a captivating collection of stories about childhood. It is a companion volume to Bron Nicholl’s earlier An Imaginary Mother. Now the focus is on the father of the family, and his disturbing transition from an easy-going, jovial man, into somebody inflexible, harsh and oppressive.
 
'The time is the decade following World-War II; the place is the flat, dry country of Northern Victoria, where John Nicholls built up a small but flourishing subsistence farm, and then abandoned it, forcing his family into another place, another life.
 
'Writing with both a child’s viewpoint and an adult’s insight, Bron has created a series of pictures filled with finely-drawn detail, subtle colours, and life’s unavoidable deep shadows.
 
'The Humming Tree is a biography of the rural poor. There is not a murmur of rancour. It is ‘a fortunate life’.' (Publication summary)

'On slender toes

Down by the water’s edge
Two egrets effortlessly hold their pose
In sedge.

They hold their pose. This show,
With all chinoiserie’s
Appeal, must be illusory. And so
It is.'

'Stephen Edgar’s nimble-footed new collection Transparencies extends his exploration of the world’s visual aspect, both in itself and as a screen for the mind’s projections. He questions, in the words of Denis O’Donoghue, ‘the delusion by which we think that reality coincides at every point with its appearances’.

'The transparencies of the title are both the daylit images of the natural world, in all their hallucinatory strangeness and beauty, and the occasions they offer us to look through them, now into deep time, as in ‘Day Book’ and ‘The Mechanicals’, now into the parallel universe of the dead, as in ‘The Returns’, or into the world within this one, as in ‘There’. Edgar’s poems look out and reach in. They probe, even as they have an exquisite ear.

'As well as moving poems on his late mother, to whom the book is dedicated, Transparencies has many pleasures. One of them is waiting for the delayed rhyme on ‘David Attenborough’.

(Publication summary)

'The Sea Palace Hotel a group of nine paintings, three photographs and twenty poems which explore Patrick and Raff's three week visit to Colaba in Mumbai, India, during February 2016. The Sea Palace Hotel is just down the road from the Taj Mahal Hotel, and the site of the Islamist terrorist killings in 2008. The Gateway To India, a huge and magnificent arch built by the Indians to welcome the English and The East India Company to India, was also the place where Raff camped for a few weeks free accommodation - back in the mists of time, when she was on the hippy trail.' (Publication summary)

'The Garden of Earth is told in Thirty Five Books. Each canto is a long-breathed sentence that takes you in its flow. They gather all the hues of nature, history, culture and philosophy like metaphorical rivers gathering majestic detritus. It invites us to consider the plenitude of the world, but also how precious and precarious a thing this is. Homer Rieth's first epic Wimmera gave voice to the history, legend and folklore of the Wimmera region of north western Victoria, and to ideas of 'place' and 'country' not only as cultural markers, but as ciphers of an enduring mythos. In his new companion epic, he turns his gaze to the larger arena of the Murray Darling, to this oldest of continents more broadly. He offers a vision of the natural environment and the human world as bound together on a global scale. The Garden of Earth is a hymn to and argument in defence of the future of the planet. It is the poet's final assay of our age-old dream vision of the world, only here it is as something at once luminous and exceptionally Australian.' (Publication summary)

'Bella. Isabella Cavani. I whisper her name. It sounds like a hummingbird fleeing my mouth, and if I shout it, the letter ‘l’ pulses in my head and vibrates away. She’s Isabella Cavani. Bella. She’s my therapist. And I’m terrified of losing her.

'Bronwen is vulnerable. She consults psychotherapist Isabella Cavani. But who is Bella? In consultations at the well-heeled therapist’s home, Bronwen wonders: is she the younger version of her mother who can listen as her own mother could not? Or is she the secret woman she desires?

'Certainly Bronwen (with an ‘e’) will reveal through their sessions the shapes of her life: her parents, teenage angst, her husband, the kind and gentle Richard, her children and their times. An exposé of the fantasies and yearnings of a woman undergoing psychotherapy, the novel offers insight into the spirited but destructive Bronwen and her quest to overcome fears and obligations to an ageing, disturbed mother.

'Told through the lens of Bronwen’s lusting for Bella, Margaret Mathews Room for Delusion oozes with life.  Mathews is brilliant at capturing the panic involved in some of our everyday acts. You will ache for the ending.' (Publication summary)

'The world is a place full of dark and light as is that of Sandy Jeffs. She explores this tension with a clarity that is troubled by shadows. Humour and sadness intermingle in a show that must go on. Popular culture and parodies of classic poems are used to illuminate the world for what it is.' (Publication summary)

'The Truth Is Longer Than A Lie is a research based play adapted from the non-fiction book of the same name by Neerosh Mudaly and Chris Goddard and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers in London. A difficult, but crucial subject, this investigative book, formerly a PHD, dissects the world of child abuse within the family and examines professional intervention methods currently practised. The play utilizes two family stories from different socio-economic worlds. Beginning with the abuse still only being known within the household, the play then moves into a world of counselling, dire family consequences and the ways in which the damaged children can continue to live. The play debuts in Melbourne in November 2015. The play-script will be published by Melbourne's Black Pepper Press in October 2015.' (Source: https://newplayexchange.org/plays/36862/truth-longer-lie )

'...with scarcely a disruption to her rhythm, a gaunt Indian woman in purple sari voided the contents of her nostril onto her hand then cast the necklace of silvery substance aside. O, Boon was a proper enough schoolboy, instructed in the use of the British handkerchief, and yet the gaunt woman’s action lodged in my mind, an image repellent, beautiful, troubling.

'Claude Boon and Henry Luck, young poets in quest of their muses, cut a swathe through the cultural capitals and byways of Europe and Asia towards the end of the Cold War.

'The Poets’ Stairwell revitalises the picaresque novel. Vibrant, sensuous and layered, it has a tumble of characters and pranks.

'Anarchist puckish Beamish, the Isadora Duncan-like Eva, class warrior, Branca, a libidinous translator of poems with Jelena, her iconoclast daughter, Luc Courlai a jailed French philosopher, Titus the Yankee acrobat who cradles his gun like a baby, Mr Hark a saintly Irish funeral director, Willi a German truck driver versed in Thomas Aquinas and sensible Rhee, Henry’s girlfriend—amongst others.' (Publication summary)

'‘Look, look,’ exhorts the opening poem of this dazzling new collection. The discoveries of observation, both physical and intellectual, ravishing and harrowing, are recounted across a broad sweep of experience. Edgar returns habitually to the character of light. Exhibits of the Sun moves from the ghostly Ferris wheel of Saturn’s rings to the beach pavilion wrapped in ochre fog during Sydney’s dust storm, from the glimpses of a lover’s light-shaped body in the passage of the moon to a vision of a whole lifetime between one eye blink and the next. Presiding over all is Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, swept away into the future as he looks back on the unravelled pageant of humanity.' (Publication summary)

'Writers and artists had come here for centuries but she was neither. She was not even seeking a new lover or running away from an old one. No, her mission was altogether different. And the fact that she came in a Boeing instead of a chariot drawn by griffins should not have encouraged anyone to doubt the seriousness of her purpose. Lucy was Nemesis. She had come to settle a very old score.

'As her mother Kate lay dying, Lucy O’Connell had learnt of a rape committed in Carlton by a young Italian boy. Not the best introduction to the parent she had never known and, yes, it was a long time ago, but Lucy believes it is never too late for justice.

'Wary of the amorous Stefano’s assistance, she battles her way through Italian bureaucracy and finally traces her father, Paolo Esposito, to his restaurant by a beach in southern Italy. There she meets his wife Silvana and her own half-siblings: cheeky Andrea, studious Chiara, scatty Rosaria.

'She lives an uneasy lie with this new family. She obsesses over how to punish her father without hurting the others. Violent forces gather. Still she ignores the friends, who insist that penitence can be more real than a mumbled rosary might suggest. That la vendetta is not the work of gods but of devils.' (Publication summary)