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A few months into 2020 I thought there was an even chance I’d be writing a swan song SRB editorial…

for Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books. Profoundly recondite, they are also deeply moving. Léger understands the literary power of the image and of narrative; the thing and its multiple renderings through mediation. This flickering between the real and its representation, between subject and object, is central to the effect of Léger’s triptych. It is not surprising, then, that the three subjects of her triptych are all associated with the representational power of the visual image and of (self-) performance.

So much has been written on the Heide group of artists, Nolan, Tucker, Hester, and their patrons John and Sunday Reed that it is hard to imagine anything more could be added. π.ο.’s Heide however, though holding this group of communalism, camaraderie, and free love as its centre, radiates backwards to the history that precedes the Reeds’ utopian endeavour, and continues into its aftermath.

In the heat of this unfolding crisis, vice-chancellors accidentally reveal the underlying logics of the spreadsheet. Budgets must be reduced, savings must be made; they tell us this as they consult the spreadsheet that surrounds them like a moat. The spreadsheet contains hard data, raw data, objective truths, they say. The numbers don’t lie. But the document is as much an operation of judgement as it is one of fiscal analysis; the spreadsheet obscures as much as it reveals.

Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world?

If women remain hidden, or hide themselves, how are those who follow to find the stories in which they blaze a trail through oceans, or support themselves and their family with literary success? As Clode writes, ‘Stories construct the mythologies of our history, help us to understand our present circumstances and illuminate the possibilities of the future. If we cannot see ourselves in stories, how can we imagine ourselves creating new ones?’ This is not, I expect, a conundrum that can ever be resolved, and one of the great pleasures of these books is the ways in which their authors fill in the blanks.

The Inland Sea is an omnivorous, heady debut dense with paradox and provocation. With no pretensions to lighting the way out of our current mess, Watts guides us into the thicket, leaves us in an anxious twilight between the material and the figurative.

As A Jealous Tide continues, MacDonald abandons the apparatus of realism in favour of a more playful and elaborate approach. The contours of time and place erode. The narrator’s watery fancies of libraries turning into vessels become hard to distinguish from the hallucinations of the shipwreck survivors she’s researching . The traffic outside filtered through the windows takes on the rhythmic sound of waves; the railing, encircling the library’s upstairs gallery, becomes a ship’s deck, listing in the breeze; the ladders are knotted ropes over the sides of a sinking ship. And her desk is now a lifeboat as she ‘magicks’ herself onto a bench seat, a sole survivor adrift in open sea.

‘Ali Smith’s decision to begin her seasonal quartet in the mellow fruitfulness of Autumn and end in glorious Summer now seems like heroic optimism. The quartet was conceived as an exercise in writing to the moment: a sequence of novels written and published at the rate of one a year, set in part at the time of their composition, responding to events as they unfolded in the wake of the bitterly fought Brexit referendum of 2016. The publishing schedule didn’t quite work out: Spring was late. Yet in the very act of aligning a creative embrace of happenstance with the cycle of the seasons there is an article of faith.’ 

It turns out the answer to the problem of poetry’s secrecy is community. In a poetry community we talk about writing and share our work with each other. We collaborate on chapbooks, read poems out loud to each other occasionally. The secret is that it doesn’t need to be secret.

But when I’m hungover in the office it feels like every second is being seared into my skin, a line I used many years ago, in a short story about a woman who had suffered a great bereavement.

Fires, although not ones that flared into storms due to climate change and land mismanagement, have burned through this area before. The story of fire and country, of loss and regrowth is not, at all, my own.

It has only been four years since Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven’s first volume, Comfort Food, appeared. While central to both collections are the experiences of young queer First Nations identity in settler Australia, Throat extends the work of Comfort Food from the retrospective of the four years that have passed since its writing. And, certainly much has happened.

‘Purity’s unifying theme, clearly announced in its title, is not ultimately social or cultural or political, but moral and psychological. Its concern with information and technology on a large scale are ultimately subordinated to its interest in the characters’ states of being, which come to be defined by their relationship to Purity (both the character and the ideal). This grounds the novel in the intimate themes of personal guilt and secrecy.’

In Crudo, Laing’s most recent book and her debut novel, the ground has shifted again. She is still an outsider – this is, for Laing, the natural position for an artist – but her point of view – an auto-fictional eye, principally narrated in the third person, who borrows from the life and work of Kathy Acker – is directed towards the inner life and the picture theatre of the mind.

I am not certain that Elizabeth von Arnim remembered her Australian beginnings but neither am I convinced that she had forgotten them altogether.

[The Media and the Massacre] is, in fact, something more fragile and rare, especially in the largely unreflective world of Australian media. It is a journalist meditating thoughtfully, and at length, on acts of journalism.