Giramondo

Kate Middleton’s accomplished first book, Fire Season, begins with ‘Autobiography’, where the child kicks against the perceived constraints and ambiguities of her sex: she could ‘make a half-decent boy’ only if the books she read were ‘full enough of war / or gunrunners, or treasure, or spies, or spoils / of piracy. No, I didn’t know how to hold a hammer.’ Middleton constructs a version of self defined by negatives: the narrator was not a ‘boy’, but does not explain why she sees ‘boy’ as the norm or as a preferred sex. Much of Fire Season explores some historical and mythical women, often in light of this shadowy definition (‘You once said // the visible and the invisible imply each other’, ‘Essay on Absence – Journal (with Judy Garland)’). In particular, Middleton invokes several movie stars – Lana Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, Doris Day, Clara Bow, Lauren Bacall, as well as Judy Garland – measuring her distance from these fabled figures, as well as investigating them as alternative lives.

The key theme of HEAT 19 is death. In 224 pages, a collection of Australian writers and academics pay homage to the departed in a range of essays, poems and short stories. The journal opens with Judith Beveridge’s moving and personal tribute to the poet Dorothy Porter. According to Beveridge, ‘Dot’ (as she was known to her friends) was a ‘consummate professional and her public performances were unfailingly polished’. However, Porter ‘also had a very fragile side, vulnerable to the pain of exclusion and rejection’. The title of Beveridge’s piece is ‘Trapper’s Way’, which is the name for a strip of land in the New South Wales suburb of Avalon where Beveridge once lived with Porter.

Self-evidently, the short story demands precision. The term ‘short story’ more than likely brings to mind the magazine-length sprint or the rapidly delivered epiphany. John Updike was a master of this demanding form. In his Olinger and Tarbox tales, characters are assembled quickly and sent to their fate with little delay. Never cursory, this was writing performed under haiku-like restraint. In the short stories of Wendy James and Tom Cho, we are presented with similarly brief and precise tales of two different Australian landscapes: one as small as a kitchen, the other as capacious as an arena. Why She Loves Him is James’s first story collection after two well-received novels. For the most part, the stories are quiet and domestic affairs. Her characters are frequently repressed and restrained, filled with rage that is rarely given voice. If the short fiction of some novelists feels too constrained, James’s evocation of despair is perfectly suited to these short bursts.

Faced with the publication of her first novel, the narrator of Stepping Out has a terrifying thought. ‘I was about to be unmasked,’ she realises. ‘End of my double life. Everyone was about to dip into my world and find out what was really cooking there ... I felt like I’d placed a bomb and was waiting, under cover, for it to explode.’

Having spent two decades or more writing massive verse novels – The Nightmarkets (1986) and The Lovemakers (2001, 2004) – it may seem that Alan Wearne, with his latest book of poetry, The Australian Popular Songbook, has finally returned to smaller forms and, as suggested by the title, a more lyrical idiom. But, as always with Wearne’s work, things aren’t that simple. The smaller forms were already present in the verse novels in the form of sonnets, villanelles and other verse forms buried in the sprawling architecture of the works’ narratives. The ‘lyrical idiom’ of The Australian Popular Songbook is ambiguous at best, offset as it is by Wearne’s characteristic attraction to the dramatic monologue, satire, vernacular culture and wrenched syntax.

In Lisa Gorton’s first collection of poetry, somewhat ambiguously entitled Press Release, light, absence and doubt are major preoccupations. The poems speak of ‘a weight of light’, ‘neon expectation’, ‘ruined cities overrun with light’ and ‘all that falling light’ – in just the first of this volume’s four sections. Light, for Gorton, is a sometimes mesmerising and often overwhelming force. Among other things, it is the illumination of nostalgia, the halo of memory and the shining-out of presence. Interestingly, it is also about culmination, often standing for various forms of – usually problematic – realisation and achievement. For example, in ‘Scald’, the poem’s persona speaks of ‘light drawn in to the idea of light, all-eye and all / forgetting, more entire than perfection’; and in ‘Guns I / Major Mitchell, 1836:’ wild birds ‘are tearing the blueblack / shadows out of the river’, as if light and life are joined in defying the ruination of death and the depredations of time. But in Gorton’s poetry light never fully escapes the dark, and in ‘Scald’ the ‘sheer of light’ is also a ‘shining blank’, while the poem’s speaker represents herself as a ‘bright / dark torso’, images in which absence, darkness and light are inextricably connected.

joanne burns: There’s a name to conjure with. The familiar lowercase signature – first encountered in my now-tattered copies of 1970s women’s poetry magazines such as Khasmik and Cauldron, and in the anthologies Mother, I’m Rooted (1975) and No Regrets (1979) – now appears on burns’s fourteenth book. An Illustrated History of Dairies offers a generous selection of her verse and prose poems, including the satires on (sub)urban life for which she is well known, condensed narrative pieces, enigmatic fragments linked by flashes of surrealist wit.

Picnic is probably Fay Zwicky’s most confident collection. In it she renounces certain kinds of brilliance for a freer and more open style of poetry – what she calls in one poem ‘the grace of candour’. It is a style that approximates moral qualities: honesty, direct ness, kindness to strangers. And it is in fact such moral qualities that give force to this collection

There is a mesmerising scene in Carpentaria when Joseph Midnight is asked if he has seen the fugitive Will Phantom, a young local Aboriginal man who is single-handedly waging a guerrilla war against a large lead ore mining company. He eyes the questioner and astutely spots him as a ‘Southern blackfella …

When John Tranter reviewed Jennifer Maiden’s first collection, Tactics (1974), he noted its ‘brilliant yet difficult imagery’ and a style ‘so idiosyncratic and forceful in a sense it becomes the subject of her work’...