David Gilbey

f ourW twenty-two is an initiative of the Booranga Writers’ Centre in Wagga Wagga. This current edition features short stories and poems by (predominantly) Australian writers. Some of these writers are prominent names; others are relatively unknown.

Dorothy Porter’s verse novels are delicious and distancing, formal, fiery and frenetic. With the possible exception of What a Piece of Work (1999), they get better and better. Early on, El Dorado smacks you in the face and strokes your imagination with a ‘little girl’s / dead hand / … sticking stiffly / up / as if reaching / to grab an angel’s / foot’. Framed by epigraphs from Gilgamesh, Peter Pan and Wallace Stevens, an enigmatic gesture of thanks ‘for the magic snakes’, a stanza from Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’ and a prologue invoking the ‘thick alien ice’ of Europa, Porter’s latest verse novel is contextualised with multiple, allusive legendry. This is a work that invokes and reimagines, iconoclastically, various fantasies (Atlantis, Neverland, El Dorado), mythologies (Greek, Roman, Christian) and pop-ular culture fantasists such as Disney, the Beatles, the Flintstones, and literary allusions to Shakespeare, Keats, Donne, Dickinson, Stevenson, Doyle, Carroll, Twain. El Dorado is as much about how fantasy works as it is a fantastic detective narrative.

On a recent plane trip from Wagga to Sydney, I was talking to an engineer who uses X-ray technology to examine the deep structure of aircraft after stress, to assess airworthiness. Complicated, fascinating, with considerable and direct bearing on passenger safety. By way of exchange, I read him parts of Aileen Kelly’s ‘Simple’, an impressive poem that, in three stanzas, X-rays the history of Christianity. One of the latter’s faultlines ‘racked / sweet fanatic poets between lambchrist / and tigerchrist’. Other stress fractures are ‘the dark arcades / where losers piss themselves / off the edge of memory’. My travelling companion had an immediate sense of Kelly’s fine metaphysics, which, as the back-page blurb glosses, finds ‘the numinous in the undeniably secular’.

Running hot on the national Austlit Discussion Group email waves recently was the question of speaking position and voice for men in contemporary critical discourse. What had occasioned the discussion was ASAL’s annual conference in Canberra, part of which had been a very successful morning at the Australian War Memorial focussing on writing and war (e.g. Alan Gould and Don Charlwood).

There are some pretty ambiguous rats in this collection and most of them are male but ultimately, it’s the writer’s own unease that cumulatively gnaws away at happiness and achievement.