Louis Klee

An unknown philosopher attends a conference, delivers a paper, launches a book: this hardly sounds like a memorable event. But Badiou’s arrival in Sydney was, in some sense, the opening of a remarkable and unlikely chapter in Australian intellectual life.

Can the analogy between poetry and work help us understand capitalism in the contemporary moment? Is poetry itself a form of work? 

‘One surprisingly persistent theme in Making Australian History is the historical significance of literature, and in particular poetry. Can a poem ‘know’ something, ‘think’ something that history cannot?’

‘What is most important to me is to write a strong text. My intentions are aesthetic, not therapeutic. The work of research, composition, revision, structuring, is what absorbs me utterly and what brings me repeatedly to the page.’

At their core, both Sydney and Signs and Wonders are books that think with what she calls ‘complicated feelings’. This is not simply to say that Falconer writes essays about feeling that are themselves keenly felt. More than this, the essayist determined to see ‘how this world goes’ must see it feelingly, as if mapping the dark room of insight with her hands.

With each collection of poems, Farrell has absorbed new tones and registers in ways subtle enough that it is easy to miss a decisive shift in the make-up of whimsy and seriousness in his work. And so we may suddenly find, reading Family Trees, that irony, kitsch, and burlesque have started to feel like elegy, philosophy, and flashes of utopian vision.

Beyond Melbourne’s Jewish community, Herz Bergner and Pinchas Goldhar are mostly remembered as ‘multicultural’ writers avant la lettre.