Kevin Brophy

Kevin Brophy reviews 'Too Many Men' by Lily Brett

July 1999, no. 212 • 01 July 1999

There are now 10,000 books written about Auschwitz. About the Holocaust there must be many more tens of thousands. Lily Brett is one of the great readers and collectors of these books. Her novels and poems are awash with Holocaust details and with an obsessive sense of responsibility for this impossible knowledge. Impossible because the horrific details cannot be held in the mind for long. In Too ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'Singing the Snake' by Billy Marshall-Stoneking

April 1990, no. 119 • 01 April 1990

‘Singing the Snake’, the poem that opens this collection, tells the story of tribes gathering at Uluru in a time of drought when ‘people drank sand’. If the singing of the people was strong and true, the Snake of Uluru would push water out from the ‘place where every river in the world begins and ends’, so that it spilled from the top of the rock. Old Tjupurrula told this story to the ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'Wishbone' by Marion Halligan

October 1994, no. 165 • 01 October 1994

The difficulty of a love affair between a young woman and a married man may be its logistics. Where can they go? These are the opening lines of Wishbone. Already I know that this is a book I want to continue reading, and not just for the promise of sex, romance, and intrigue. I am also attracted by the ‘difficulty’ of knowing just what tone is being taken here, and just who is speaking to ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'The Love Song of Lucy McBride' by Steven Carroll

February–March 1998, no. 198 • 01 February 1998

In his third novel, Steven Carroll continues to work on those questions, obsessions, scenes and images that preoccupy him as a writer – the characters and personalities of women, and in particular that figure of a sexually charged and sophisticated young woman so disturbing to Helen Garner in The First Stone; the language of infatuation; the placement of characters in their particular city; mism ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'City and Stranger' by Aileen Kelly, 'In Your Absence: Poems 1994–2002' by Stephen McInerney, and 'Flying Blind' by Deborah Westbury

December 2002-January 2003, no. 247 • 01 December 2002

‘Some meteorites make it to the surface simply because they’re so small that they literally float to the ground. There are thousands of these interplanetary particles in the room you’re in now, stuck to your clothes, in your hair, everywhere.’ This startling piece of information introduces Aileen Kelly’s ‘Notes from the Planet’s Edge’ in her new book, City and Stranger (Five I ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'My Boyfriend's Father' by Ben Winch and 'The Man Who Painted Women' by John Newton

July 1996, no. 182 • 01 July 1996

‘When I was eighteen my boyfriend’s father died in jail.’ This is the opening sentence of Ben Winch’s second novel; it is also the conclusion of the novel and, having got that out of the way, we can settle into the details that will tell us why this man died in jail and what his story means for this now eighteen-year-old woman. ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'Sandstone' by Andrew Taylor

May 1995, no. 170 • 11 February 2020

On my most recent visit to Warrnambool in December 1994, the newspapers carried a tragic story about some local youths who had been digging in the coastline dunes and sandstone cliffs outside the town. One of them had died when their cave collapsed. It is this wild, unpredictably dangerous but attractive coastline that features in the title sequence to Andrew Taylor’s new book. In Sandstone, the ... (read more)

Kevin Brophy reviews 'Night Parrots' by John Kinsella

September 1989, no. 114 • 01 September 1989

Lasseter, it has been said, was a strange man, admired for his unusual and innovative ideas. He told a story of being caught during a storm in Central Australia: he put all his clothes in a hollow log, stood naked until the storm passed, and was then able to don his dry clothing. Though some claim that Lasseter was at Gallipoli, he did become the source of another great Australian myth of failure. ... (read more)

Kris Hemensley reviews 'Visions' by Kevin Brophy

May 1989, no. 110 • 01 May 1989

Elizabeth Riddell quipped about Kevin Brophy’s first novel, Getting Away With It (Wildgrass, 1982), that he hadn’t! I do not recall anything else of her review, but must confess that it also replaced my own estimation of the book. With hindsight, it’s clear that the novel has too many attributes to be disqualified, however wittily. Furthermore, Brophy’s new novel, Visions, recovers the bes ... (read more)

State Editor's Introduction by Kevin Brophy | States of Poetry WA - Series Two

States of Poetry Western Australia - Series Two • 13 October 2017

Poetry, in ‘stilling things’, as Martin Heidegger suggested in 1950, is nevertheless always restlessly active. These six voices are six stills from a fast-moving history of poetry in Western Australia. They are evidence that poetry can provide moments we can enter into in suspended silence while experiencing that movement and agitation so essential to important poetry. Ben Lerner, in The Hatr ... (read more)