Archive
In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littor ...
Odd to start by quoting P.G. Wodehouse: ‘She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose.’ Bertie Wooster is complaining, in ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’1, about Honoria Glossop, who has forced upon him ‘Types of Ethical Theory’. ‘Odd’ because anyone steeped to the gills i ...
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
For what it is worth, my own view is that in contemporary Australia the dialectical quest for truth about the indigenous culture, by open argument and counter-argument, is no less important ...
Taken as Required
by Ynes Sanz
An age ago, ill-matched,
ignorant but willing,
we set the rules.
‘Step by Step’, we said. ‘No Bullshit.’
Today, thinking of something else
I stumbled across the grey metal bracelet
you looped over that stick of a wrist
where your thin blood stained the skin
to resemble an antique map or a bad tattoo
(like the one they inked on for that photo shoot in the ’50s).
Southerly and élitism
Dear Editor,
I was pleased to see ABR’s review of the seventieth birthday issue of Southerly (March 2010), but I need to respond to a number of matters raised in Jeffrey Poacher’s review. First, though, I need to own the error pointed out by Mr Poacher. Mr Poacher correctly observes that I twice get wrong the name of the founding editor. The man’s name was R.G. Howarth. I wrote R.J. Howarth. The middle initial was wrong.
... (read more)