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 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

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

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

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!

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.

dotdotdash

In these harsh economic times it’s nice to see people brave enough to launch a literary magazine, so kudos to dotdotdash coming out of WA. I like the website and they have a mission to promote new writers and writing.

They have a blog too (no posts yet) and a theme for the next issue:

Our theme for Issue 1 is Quicksand. This may mean sand that has been agitated alive. Or the Earth reclaiming us. Industry rusting. Secrets pooling. Sudden mazes. It is amorphous hydrogel. It is whatever you make of it. We welcome themed and un-themed work.

I was reading a review of a new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins tonight and it got me thinking about Hopkins again. The review by Dennis Donoghue in the New Criterion talks about the difficulties and beauty of this poet and I was reminded of my favourite Hopkin’s poem, The Windhover, and I went back to read it again after a long break. Here it is:

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I must admit, I’m a sucker for the life of the writer, the life behind the poem, so when a book of letters comes out tracing the correspondence between two of my favourite poets, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, I admit it, I’m hooked.

Read the review in the Atlantic Monthly HERE

For a long time I’ve been interested in the changing landscape. particularly the changes at the suburban margins as development overpowers the old lines of the land. I’ve documented some of those ideas in the Suburban Margins project on my poetry web site.

So, it was nice to see some connections with those ideas in Fading Victoria, which is a collection of images of change, more semi-rural than suburban, but great images and ideas all the same. They’re from Rowan Crowe who writes:

Consumer hunger for residential land and infrastructure is slowly destroying many historical sites located near the steadily expanding fringes of suburbia. Weather also takes its toll on beautiful rural buildings that have been abandoned by their owners. What causes them to just walk away?