Poetry

This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.

Reading and writing are bodies within bodies and rooms within each other. Fitch’s poetry is exemplary in terms of showing us the possibilities – and impossibilities (like reading in a dark room, like being in spaces we aren’t) – of the reading/writing (or pretext/text) relation. But there is no separate room or compartment where we house our reading: writing brings back all kinds of memories of mental and affective experience, including those involving digital forms, and material art.

The lyric’s charge always catalyses new arrangements: it crackles not only through the recording, but across forms and bodies in elaborate, improvised, staged and/or filmic choreographies. Similarly, I tend to think not only of the charge of my language, but about how this charge might propel the poem into distributions across an open field, or how it might slip through the crevices between words into arrays of diacritical marks—dashes, brackets, loops, shapes, even photographs.

‘Though few would associate one with the other, the ‘Bard of Bunyah’ and the writer once renowned for being the country’s first Aboriginal novelist lived remarkably parallel literary lives. They were born three months apart in 1938; they both lost parents early in life and endured difficult childhoods in rural towns; they led somewhat peripatetic existences in their early twenties before publishing their first books to modest acclaim in 1965; they rose in reputation through the 1970s and 80s (Murray much more quickly than Mudrooroo) and by the 1990s had become singular presences in Australian literature; they had life and career defining moments in 1996 that brought on the final phase of their literary careers. Last year, they died four months apart. In all, Murray spent 42 more days on this earth than Mudrooroo.’

In October 2017 I led twenty people around the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. It was a guided walk, but unlike any most in the group had experienced before. Mine was one of five walks in a public arts project aimed to facilitate aural attentiveness to our environment

Since I started work on this review, I’ve resisted turning it into an essay about the kindness movement. Felicity Plunkett’s poetry deserves our full attention. But the book is called A Kinder Sea, and as I’ve been reading and re-reading these poems, I’ve found I can’t stop thinking about kindness, or rather, what I have begun to call, in my head, the problem of kindness.

These books suggest that all writing can be read in the manner that one reads a poem, that is, with an acute sensitivity to the processes through which meaning is configured in a particular textual event.

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo…, into that of charismatic megapoems.

Often against my will, but in my imagination, I would force myself to drive into that river, out of it and alongside it.

By juxtaposing the accounts of settlers – who believed that the appropriation, and later purchase, of land was legitimate – with the effects of their occupation on Māori, Hawken highlights the greater struggles of Māori within the European narrative of settlement.