Reviews
What To Leave Out
Two memoirs, one fiction? Or one family history, two fictions entwined into a single narrative, and a ‘reflection on the arc of a life’? All three of these books show women writing themselves into being, as they construct narrative from the raw materials of unwieldy lives, whether imagined or real. Each writes and rewrites sensation, tactile detail, exchange or confrontation, revising and rediscovering through the process. Sophia Barnes on new work by Drusilla Modjeska, Debra Adelaide and Beth Yahp
Laconic Stance Drive: hows its by Nick Whittock
‘There are other Australian poems about cricket, but no one but Nick Whittock has taken it for their major theme. For Whittock, cricket – the matches, the players, the history, and its accompanying discourse: of commentary, commodification (sponsorship), and sensation (cricket on the front pages) – is not only his subject, but his medium.’ Michael Farrell on Nick Whittock and the Australian avant-garde.
In the Swash Zone: Harriet Chandler by Moya Costello
Taking the means of production and dissemination into your own hands through self-publication throws a spanner into the established system of book marketing and promotional recognition. Is that why Moya Costello’s brilliant, beautiful book, Harriet Chandler, slipped through the net?
Rewriting the American Myth: Failed Frontiersmen
‘As the mythic space of the American imagination, the frontier has never closed. It remains the place where America conceives its identity, its values, and its destiny.’ Chris Conti on a new book about the enduring impact of frontier mythology on American fiction.
The Rings of Saturn: A Lasting Chronicle of Mourning
‘Rings of Saturn is not a novel in the standard form; it is part travelogue, part memoir, part essay-meditation and part fiction. It’s a riff and an improvisation on found and obsessed-over material, and a close reading of place, territories, time, texts and history.’ Shannon Burns on reading W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn – twenty years on.
Measured out in coffee spoons: M Train by Patti Smith
‘I have been referring to M Train as a ‘memoir’ by default, but it is something far more ambitious and complex than the word implies. It is a work in an elegiac mode that occupies an indeterminate space between autobiography, essay and fiction.’ James Ley on Patti Smith’s M Train and Collected Lyrics.
What The Essayist Spills: The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum
What are essays for? They are for thinking about things that need to be thought about yet don’t get thought about much, or at all, or interestingly, or for long enough. They are for picking up ideas, feelings, forces in the air, still unnamed and amorphous, and giving them a foothold in language. Whatever is in the air and whatever is disappearing – unnoticed, unmourned. They are for resisting choices offered to us that are not true, yet made to seem inescapable.
Catcher and Sifter: Net Needle by Robert Adamson
‘Net Needle indicates in its title the poem as net, an often-recurring, even talismanic word throughout Robert Adamson’s work. The net is both catcher and sifter, with the needle able to repair and renew. Net Needle then is also the constantly revitalised net accentuating the craft of making – ‘They stitched their lives into my days’ (‘Net Makers’) – and achieves a precarious equilibrium through its scrutiny of life’s twists and reinventions.’
Auden’s Skirmish With The Real
‘For Auden the writing of literary non-fiction prose, which largely consists of reviews, prefaces, and lectures, was far from hack work. The two volumes in question total well over a thousand pages. It is striking how consistently measured and thoughtful each piece is. He may repeat ideas in different forums, but you never have the sense that he has a deadline to meet, or that he ever was rash in his judgement or expression.’ Simon West on the late prose of W.H. Auden.