Jeffrey Poacher

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'Southerly, Vol. 69, No. 2: Southerly At Seventy' edited by David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon

March 2010, no. 319 • 01 March 2010

It is time to raise our glasses: Australia’s oldest literary magazine is now a sprightly septuagenarian. The latest number of Southerly marks the occasion by encasing itself in what appears to be a reproduction of one of its covers from the middle of the last century, complete with foxing and a pencil notation of its pre-decimal price. This retro jacket should serve as a reminder of the journal ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'Meanjin, Vol. 69, No. 1' edited by Sophie Cunningham

April 2010, no 320 • 01 April 2010

There is something to offend everyone in the latest issue of Meanjin. Several contributors boldly tackle religious questions – always plenty of kindling for the fire there. Jeff Sparrow takes on the so-called ‘New Atheists’, in the process throwing a few Marxist haymakers at Bush, Rudd and ‘the Israeli apartheid state’. The ‘religious undergirding’ of secular thought is considered by ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'The Bath Fugues' by Brian Castro

July-August 2009, no. 313 • 01 July 2009

Living as a displaced person in Berlin during the early 1930s was no picnic, especially if you happened to have a Jewish wife. This was the situation Vladimir Nabokov found himself in, so it is hardly surprising that at one point he considered emigrating to Australia. Had he done so, how different would our literature look today? Perhaps we would have more novels like Brian Castro’s latest, for ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'Black Mountain' by Venero Armanno

October 2012, no. 345 • 26 September 2012

Venero Armanno’s latest novel begins implausibly. A young man is troubled by a recurring dream about a faceless, one-armed, blob-like creature being throttled by someone wearing a pale blue shirt. This troubled dreamer is Mark Alter (the unsubtle last name underlines one of the book’s central concerns), a university drop-out estranged from his parents and now leading a grungy existence in a se ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'Welcome to Normal' by Nick Earls

July–August 2012, no. 343 • 09 July 2012

Wheen asked why his later writing had taken on such a different character, Eugenio Montale explained that this was because it came from la retrobottega – literally, from the back of the shop – that place where an artist might unhurriedly conduct a private experiment or two. Something similar might be said of Welcome to Normal, the first collection of stories by Nick Earls in more than a decade ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'The Magic of It' by Michael Wilding

November 2011, no. 336 • 25 October 2011

Declarations of loathing for the other members of one’s species tend to be tedious in reality but hilarious in fiction. The characters in Michael Wilding’s latest novel repeatedly prove this point with their mock-serious diatribes against, among others, the habitués of Sydney coffee shops (‘black-clad, metal-pierced creatures’), the patrons of English pubs (‘maggots … a rabble’), an ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'The Fix' by Nick Earls

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011

In contemporary crime fiction, first-person narrators can often sound irritatingly implausible, either too much the Marlovian stoic or too much the Holmesian savant. This is not the case with The Fix, Nick Earls’s latest offering, in which the narratorial voice is convincing from the first page. Then again, The Fix is hardly a conventional work of crime fiction; it has some ingredients of the ge ... (read more)

Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'The End of Longing' by Ian Reid

May 2011, no. 331 • 21 April 2011

What do we really know about other people, even those closest to us? In one of Chekhov’s most famous stories, the supreme adulterer Gurov takes the view that authentic life is always lived in secret (though, of course, he would say that). Marriage offers no ready access to another person’s history, as a young wife discovers in Ian Reid’s début novel, The End of Longing. Her problem of knowl ... (read more)