When I lamented the passing of Australian poet Robert Adamson HERE, back at the end of 2022, I didn’t think we’d see another book by the poet laureate of the Hawkesbury.
So, I was pleased to hear today of the publication of Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury, an autobiographical focus on the natural life of the river he loved. I read a positive review in The Conversation and have ordered a copy and will share my thoughts when it arrives.
It’s nice to have one more book to look forward to from a poet I’ve had so much pleasure from over the years.
I thought I’d open 2024 with a new, and expanded communication beyond the traditional blog (funny to think that blogs which were once innovative, are now traditional!) and websites and begin … you guessed it … a. newsletter.
The idea is that this will be a looser, wider, more wide-ranging kind of communication that will include books and writing but a range of other stuff I’m interested in, and think worth sharing. Think: cycling and ebikes, food and wine, cooking and gardening, technology and analog tools. The list goes on.
This blog will remain, and will remain the primary focus of my reflections on reading and writing, but I’m hoping the new newsletter (as yet un-named) will have broader appeal and share useful tidbits with those who are interested.
I hope to see you there. I’ll keep readers here up to date with how it progresses. Meanwhile, it’s summertime and there’s tomatoes from the garden (below)
Every year I like to remember and celebrate the books that I’ve enjoyed most. This year, according to the statistics and the increasingly controversialGoodreads, I read 50 books, more than usual for me. I tended to read more widely and loosely this year, more fiction than previously and enjoying it more, though I still struggle a bit with reading books online, unless I’m travelling. Here are my top five books of the year. You can see what else I read and coonnect with me on Goodreads HERE.
1. J. G. Ballard – Empire of the Sun
This highly autobiographical novel came out in 1984 and is based largely on Ballard’s own childhood experiences in Shanghai during World War II. Better known as a dystopian science-fiction writer, no doubt the horrific experiences of a sudden, dramatic utter transformation in status influenced his sf writing.
As he put it: “The memories of Shanghai that I had tried to repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet, and had slipped quietly into my fiction.” Those memories included casual violence, and an upheaval in status as his family became Japanese prisoners.
What stuck me most strongly was the lifelong lesson that Ballard took from this experience, on the impermanence of our daily reality. Everything can be uprooted and destroyed.
“One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set,” he once told a journalist. “The comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it … could be dismantled overnight.”
It’s an uncomfortable lesson that resonated with me as violence. and warfare continues to destroy lives.
2. Iain Sinclair – Downriver
This is a strange and wonderful book; one reviewer called it the Greatest Welsh Novel, though it is firmly London, England, and the Thames that are at the centre here.
As the same reviewer wrote:
Downriver is relentlessly peripatetic, taking place almost entirely on foot, on public transport or in public spaces. The novel’s geography gravitates around the area of Hackney, Homerton, Spitalfields and Bow, moving towards the river through Wapping and Shadwell across to Rotherhithe, then following the river East past the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown and Tilbury, out into the estuary and the Isle of Sheppey.
and
As well as psychogeography, Downriver adapts the methods of modernist poetry and conceptual art to the novel. It might be thought of as an ‘open field’ novel. Sinclair’s early poetry works from the 1970s, such as LudHeat, are composed in the open field style promoted by Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson.
If it sounds complex and difficult that’s because, at times, it is. Sinclair is, at his heart, a poet and the language is baroque, intense, poetic and powerful. I can also strongly recommend some of Sinclair’s other work, particularly London Orbital and Lights Out for the Territory
3. David Marr – ‘Killing for Country’
This was a harrowing read for me, particularly in the dark shadow of a failed referendum vote in Australia to recognise indigenous Australians in the constitution. As I wrote at the time on GoodReads:
‘If this detailed account of the brutality of white settlement wasn’t grim enough, reading it in the shadow of the recent defeat of a referendum that might have gone a tiny, tentative step towards redress was dark indeed.
This is an account of how vested interests, greed, brutality, ignorance, weasel words and lies were easily able to defeat the small voices of humanity and protest as white settlement spread through Australia in the 19th century, leaving indigenous Australians dispossessed or dead.
It is unrelenting stuff: ‘dispersals’ of Australian natives code for unprovoked attacks and massacres that went on and on wherever there was land to be exploited and indigenous Australians in the way.
The views of the conservative Liberal Senator who campaigned strongly during the referendum against giving a parliamentary voice to indigenous Australians arguing that there are “no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation” look more outlandish and perverse with every page of this book.
As Marr wrote, just prior to the referendum, ‘Polls show hostility is strongest where most blood was shed. Despising those we have wronged is another way we humans have of dealing with our shame’. Queensland, where most of the murderous events described here took place, was the Australian state most strongly against giving indigenous Australians a voice.
This is not a pleasant or easy read. It might have been more effective if the family connections, and the relationship of the author to the anti-hero of this story, were made earlier but it is important nevertheless.
For David Marr, the new knowledge that one of his forebears served in the brutal Native Police demanded reckoning and truth-telling. It is a pity that, on the larger scale, Australia is still not ready for coming to the truth; books like this, hard as they are, can only help progress our understanding.’
4. Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell – ‘Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra 1955-1964’
I blogged about this beautiful book earlier in the year HERE, but since then I’ve been thinking more about the ideas here, and how it has got me thinking again about Charmian Clift, George Johnston and Leonard Cohen, and the bohemian writers and artists who were trying to escape the world in a Greek island that was half paradise and half prison.
5. Sarah Holland-Batt – ‘The Jaguar’
Holland-Batt is an Australian poet and this collection is a powerful new addition to her work, with a focus on her father’s illness and death, with universal significance. As poetry should.
Other books I enjoyed …
Barry Lopez – Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World Richard Ford – Be Mine Anna Funder – Wifedom Ben Shattuck – Six Walks; in the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau Katharine Smyth: All the Lives We Ever Lived; Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf John Banville – The Singularities
The real hero of this quiet, understated, handsome, weighty book is the photography of James Burke, who took his photo journalist skills to Hydra in the 60s, capturing George Johnson, Charmian Clift, Leonard Cohen, and others, in their new and beautiful environment. His wonderful photographs are presented generously throughout the text and indeed seem to drive some of the narrative.
The actual purpose of this book is less clear. I imagined it was going to be about George Johnson and Charmian and Clift’s relationship on Hydra, and it partly is, but is as much a history of Hydra itself as an island, as part of Greece, and then through the early 1960s as a kind of counter cultural icon for international expats and ‘takes Johnston and Clift’s arrival on Hydra in August 1955, as a transitional moment in the development of the islands, expatriate artist community’.
That it sometimes feels like a transformed thesis from a couple of academics and at others as gossipy and introspective and claustrophobic as it must have felt for those living in such close quarters as aliens on a foreign shore, does not detract from this text. If you admire George Johnston’s ‘My Brother Jack’ trilogy, as I do, then this is well worth exploring and sits alongside Johnston’s work and Clift’s ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ as indispensable background reading.
It seems clear that Johnston needed to leave Australia to write his great novel about Australia and that thus this little, beautiful Greek island is significant in the history of Australian literature.
I took some time today after a long walk in the winter wind and after yesterday’s post, to gather the Hodgins books I have and scan front and back covers and some other key pages including a couple of poems to give readers a sense of these books and the work therein.
I couldn’t locate my copy of Dispossessed. Probably, it got mixed up in my teaching materials when I stopped teaching Literature a couple of years ago. Dispossessed is Hodgins’ verse novel, and was commonly set for senior English and Literature courses over the last few years. It is included in full in his Selected Poems.
Blood and Bone (1986)
Blood and Bone (A&R, 1986)Signed by Philip HodginsPoem from ‘Blood and Bone’Back cover of ‘Blood and Bone’
Animal Warmth (A&R 1990)
Animal Warmth (A&R, 1990)Back cover of ‘Animal Warmth’
A Kick of the Footy
‘A Kick of the Footy’ was a promotional sampler published by A&R in 1990, foreshadowing a selection of football related poems in a future Hodgins book. I’m unsure whether these poems appeared in later books.
A Kick of the Footy (Poetry sampler, A&R, 1990)Foreword by Ron Barassi to ‘A Kick of the Footy’Poem ‘Snap Shot’ from ‘A Kick of the Footy’Back cover of ‘A Kick of the Footy’ – NOT FOR SALE
Things Happen (1995)
Things Happen (A&R, 1995) Brief biography from ‘Things Happen’Poem from ‘Things Happen’Back cover of ‘Things Happen’
Selected Poems (1997)
Selected Poems (A&R, 1997)Brief biography from ‘Selected Poems’Contents page 1 from ‘Selected Poems’Contents pages 2 and 3 from ‘Selected Poems’Back cover of ‘Selected Poems’
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thinking about poetry 