Ed Wright

Auster’s attempt to borrow from the chronology and geography of his own life to create a masterful multi-noded bildungsroman is an interesting idea, but 4321 is ultimately far too long-winded and sententious for that idea to properly work.’

‘The pace of living in a city a tenth the size of Sydney teaches someone like myself, who has been obsessed with literature since my early teens, of the rich complexity of lives and characters to be found outside the community of the book. Where people once came to Sydney from places like Newcastle and smaller to find the world of the book, in Newcastle you find the book’s place in the world, a discovery whose emotional resonances include fear and release.’ Ed Wright on novels about Newcastle and the literary life of Australia’s first industrial city.

Michael Farrell enjoys a reputation as one of the foremost experimental poets in the contemporary Australian scene. In Cocky’s Joy, while experimentalism is strongly evident, he seems to have struck a superb and playful balance, a kind of lyrical abstractionism that generates pleasure and intellectual satisfaction at the same time as it continues to question and resist the urge to meaning. The consequence is a free-wheeling, idea-shifting, constantly suggestive, sometimes touching, politically acerbic and often very funny book of poetry. Farrell shows himself to be a ludic master, and reading Cocky’s Joy is as refreshing as going on a holiday.