The Red Highway

Another early (?) contender for my book of the year award, I just finished reading Nicolas Rothwell’s The Red Highway, a strange kind of disconnected personal journey into the heart of Australia, that grew on me the more I read it.

Sure, it’s ‘implausible’, and I had trouble figuring out whether I was framing this as fiction or non-fiction, but it’s not ‘implausible nonsense’ as one reviewer put it. There’s a range of viewpoints on the Crikey blogs HERE and a fairly positive review by Liam Davison in The Australian HERE, but some passages were wonderful.  I asked my daughter, who works at ‘Readings’ how I should categorise this and she didn’t hesitate: “Landscape Memoir”.  That’s my favourite category!

Imagine

Imagine if poets and novelists wrote the news? Now read on…

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.  FULL STORY HERE

Sonnet from China

I read a blog posting today, or rather it was posted to me as it seems China is currently blocking some blogging sites, about a friend’s visit to Nanjing and the museum to the massacres there. Which made me think of one of my favourite Auden poems, a sonnet from China, and its haunting, hopeless last lines:

XII


Here war is harmless like a monument:
A telephone is talking to a man;
Flags on a map declare that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
Who can be lost and are, who miss their wives
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

Yet ideas can be true, although men die:
For we have seen a myriad faces
Ecstatic from one lie,

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now.
Nanking. Dachau.

W.H Auden

Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’

It’s always nice to be confirmed in your judgements by a committe of experts, so for that reason and more I was delighted to see that Marilynne Robinson’s Home, my own Book of the Year winner for 2008, has just won the Orange Prize for fiction.  It’s a wonderful book I say again, and some describe her as the greatest living novelist.

More here at the GUARDIAN

A Pod of Poets

I knew about the Radio National poetry progam Poetica of course, a long running poetry program hosted by Mike Ladd; they’ve even broadcast a couple of my poems in their ‘First Hearing’ series aeons ago. But I didn’t know about the ‘Pod of Poets‘ project, which is an audio archive of a group of important Australian poets.

They describe it this way:

A Pod of Poets is a series of eleven, 40-minute podcasts of Australian poetry, read by the authors. The poets come from all over Australia; some are emerging talents and some are established; several of them are on the school syllabus.

The audio is available to download here and you’ll also find transcripts, photographs, interviews, and more. We hope that this website will be an ongoing resource for researchers, schools, universities and the general podcast audience.

The poets are: Robert Adamson, Les Murray, Joanne Burns, John Kinsella, Josephine Rowe, Craig Billingham, L.K. Holt, Aidan Coleman, Jayne Fenton Keane, Martin Harrison, Sam Wagan Watson, Kathryn Lomer, Esther Ottaway, John Clarke and Jordie Albiston.

Definitely worth a listen!

The Ambrosiacs

I was lucky enough this week to get an e-copy of Les Wicks‘ latest book The Ambrosiacs, just published by Island Press.  This is Wicks’s eighth book and, even though I haven’t finished it yet, I’m enjoying it, as I’ve always enjoyed his work.  I’ll try to say something a little more detailed about it later.

Meanwhile, you can read more about Wicks and his work HERE, read Jerusalem Track, a poem of Wicks or read a review of an earlier book in Cordite.