Lyn McCredden

Sitting, a few years ago, in the audience at a writers’ festival in the south-west of Western Australia, at a panel session hosted by Jennifer Byrne, I was struck by the widespread reaction to one of the panellists announcing that the book she had chosen to discuss was Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (now securely canonised as an ‘Australian national classic’, as Fiona Morrison’s essay in this volume points out). A ripple of reverential approval went through the auditorium and discreet murmurs of ‘my favourite book’ were exchanged. This response demonstrated the feeling aroused by Winton and his work in a large section of the general reading public, particularly in the West.

Katherine Gallagher’s is a poetry of small spaces and objects, tiny hollows of memory that momentarily glow, incandescent, in the imagination: ‘knotted roots / reaching down into the riverbed’, ‘faces mottled in eucalyptus shade’, that place ‘beside the pond, in foaming clusters / creamy flowers of meadowsweet; / and there’s goatsbeard (‘jack-go-to-bed-at-noon’) / bird’s-foot trefoil, majoram and reeds.’ These latter lines are from the poem ‘Summer Odyssey (Railway Fields, for D.B.)’, an occasional poem for a small piece of land ‘Between Green Lane and the New River’s / four hundred-year-old waterway’. The poet spins from the ordinary and the overlooked a world of intricacy and quiet sensual power.=

Who reads literary magazines, and why do they? Writers looking for what is being published, academics keeping up with who is being published, the elusive ‘general reader’ looking for a good read? The current volumes of HEAT and Westerly offer multiple reasons and rewards for picking them up, reasons which extend well beyond these superficial factors. Reasons which may send you to the postbox with a subscription form.

The dominant note of Professor Kramer’s long-awaited James McAuley is control. The volume will no doubt be gratefully received by lovers and adversaries of McAuley’s literary achievement, for many reasons: it brings before a wider reading audience guile a few new poems published only in the little-circulated volume Time Given (1976). These poems can now receive their due and wider admiration. (Unfortunately, only thirteen of the thirty-one poems from Time Given have been reprinted here, in two different sections.) This volume also gives wider accessibility to some of McAuley’s scattered journalism and literary criticism. Fifteen essays have been selected, but I 1hink it a great pity that some of the essays referred to and discussed at some length in Kramer’s introduction do not appear in the text, especially the seminal and highly ambivalent ‘The Magian Heresy’. In a similar way Kramer mentions the importance of the poem ‘A Letter to John Dryden, but summarily dismisses it as ‘the rather strident satire’, and does not include it in the volume.