Ann Patchett’s Whistler at the Book Club

Posted on 25 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Ann Patchett, Whistler (Bloomsbury 2026)

Before the meeting: This is a story about a web of relationships among middle class people in north-eastern USA. It starts when the narrator, 54 year old school-teacher Daphne Fuller, is wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her hospital administrator husband, Jonathan (excellent name, correctly spelled) notices that an older man has been surreptitiously following them. They charge through gallery after gallery to shake him off, but he catches up and reveals that he is Eddie, Daphne’s stepfather. But her stepfather’s name is Lucas. Then in a flash she remembers that her mother married twice after her first marriage ended, and she has completely forgotten Eddie, her first stepfather.

She has forgotten him, but in his brief time in the father role, she loved him with a passion. As the novel unfolds we come to know Eddie as a universally loved book editor, we learn the story of his marriage to Daphne’s mother and, crucially, Daphne remembers and tells for the first time the story of a road accident in which she and Eddie were involved when she was nine years old and he was 32.

It’s an enjoyable read, with a smooth New York wit and a gallery of pleasantly interesting characters. I wasn’t bored but I found myself wondering if there was any point to it. Then, towards the end, Daphne happens on a moment of tenderness between two other characters:

I wondered what anyone ever knows about another person’s relationship.

Looking at these two men leaning against one another in the middle of the room like a couple of support beams, one of them too tired to even go and sit down, I realized the answer was nothing. I knew nothing at all.

I think that comes close to naming the book’s central theme. There are any number of relationships that are easy to sum up in a word or two. But look just a little bit closer and they are full of surprises. And, unlike in the familiar Long Day’s Journey kinto Night structure, it usually turns out that people are kinder, braver, more generous that they seem. Which may be exactly what many of us need in a book just now.

One little note: I wonder if anyone else found echoes of the children’s writing of William Steig in Eddie’s witty dialogue, and in particular of Brave Irene (link is to my blog post) in young Daphne’s blizzard adventure. Please say in the comments.

At the meeting: No one else was much interested in my Brave Irene reference, though in reflecting about our discussion I think it is to the point.

Generally people felt that the book stayed on the surface of characters. But as we talked, it emerged, at least in my mind, that there’s a lot going on that you could easily skim over – much in the way a child can read something like Brave Irene without worrying about any deep themes. For instance, when one person said she was unconvinced by Daphne’s mother’s break-up with Eddy we did a group effort of teasing out her motivations. Someone else raised the question of whether there was something sexual going on between the adult Eddie and child Daphne trapped overnight in a crashed car in the book’s main event: I don’t think so, though it was certainly intimate and bonding, but the question was there. Or again, Daphne loved Eddie when he was her stepfather, which surely has something to sdo with her marrying a man 15 years older than her – if so, the book doesn’t make a point of it, and no one cares. Then there’s the delicious irony, which again is there without signposting, that the only character who is thoroughly negative is a man who once made a fortune from a series of books promoting positivity. (The irony of his negativity as opposed his fame resting on positivity is explicit, but not the meta-irony that he is the book’s beacon of negativity.)

That is to say, I was onto something. I await the opinion of my children’s literature–savvy readers.

The Book Club always discusses two books. Our companion to Whistler was The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, about which I plan to blog tomorrow. A very different book.

We ate an excellent dinner of fish and kipfler potatoes, followed by a lemon delicious pudding cooked from a TinEats recipe. After our book discussion we did a little karaoke using our hostess’s new toy.

I read Whistler and wrote the first pat of this post on Wulgurukaba country, the beautiful island of Yunbenun. The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the rest of the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those Nations who have cared for this country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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Gillian Rubinstein’s Screaming and Euphoria

Posted on 22 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Gillian Rubinstein, Screaming and Euphoria (Flying Island 2026)

In the late 1980s I was visiting a friend in Adelaide when her son, who was 10 or 11 years old and a non-reader, waxed lyrical about a book called Space Demons. Though I was the editor of a children’s literary magazine I hadn’t heard of it. It was the first children’s book I read that involved computer games, and I soon shared my young friend’s enthusiasm.

Space Demons (1987) was Gillian Rubinstein’s first book. She went on to write more than 30 books for children, including picture books. On the one occasion I heard her read from her work, she read Dog in, Cat Out (1993), which even without Ann James’s brilliant illustrations was a hilarious riff on the demands of pets. From the early 2000s, she wrote for adults in a long-running series of historical novels set in Japan, under the pseudonym Lian Hearn.

Screaming and Euphoria is her first book of poetry.

It’s a book of memory, with a masterful story-telling skill suffusing its many short poems. There is a complicated childhood, as the title of ‘Villanelle for my three fathers’ suggests. Poems celebrate a childhood friend, her sister, a long living pet dog, a visit as a teenager to Kano in Nigeria (‘my white skin bubbled with sunburn’). She tells of her marriages (the poem ‘Marriage to Ion’ begins ‘I did not love my first husband’ and ends, ‘he ran off with a Swingle singer, / leaving me dizzy with relief / and gratitude.’) She has children, and the evokes experience of early parenthood, especially in ‘A riddle’ (page 55), which begins:

I am the expected intruder 
sleep disruptor, life exploder 
treasure of the poor.
I will shatter your illusions.
I will fill you with love.

It’s not a continuous narrative, but there’s a roughly chronological ordering of memories (as in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, intense remembered moments).

The poems that stand out for me are those dealing with loss and grief. There are a number of losses, as you would expect from a poet who is in her 80s – parents (‘Daddy: full fathom five’ recalls the death of her father when she was 10 years old), friends, and towards the end her husband Philip. I love ‘What they talked about before he died’, a wonderful, restrained elegy: and ‘Boiling Eggs’, in which she recalls his inept but loving daily breakfast-making. The poem on page 78*, ‘An Aubade for Philip’, is one of my favourites:

It’s one of the few rhyming poems in the book, and one of the few that announces itself as belonging to a particular tradition. There’s a kind of humility in this. It places the poem in a tradition of poems dealing with similar material, and suggests that the experience it refers to, however intense or painful, is in an important sense not unique. It’s part of our shared humanity.

An aubade is a traditional form, the dawn equivalent of a serenade. Originally it would consist of a lover bidding farewell to the beloved as the sun rose. John Donne wrote a number that played with the form but kept this basic premise:

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
               Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Of course the form has morphed over the centuries. Probably the most famous example of the 20th century, Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, doesn’t feature a lover at all, but in the hours before dawn its speaker experiences a deep fear of death (you can read it at this link). Gillian Rubinstein may have had this poem at the back of her mind, especially the second line:

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

Both she and he wake at four, and neither is in the presence of a lover. Both are in rhyming iambics. But there the similarities end:

Four in the morning. The alarm is ringing, 
I let the cat in, make green tea and write.
Still dark but the first birds are singing, 
singing and singing with the growing light.

These stolen hours are mine.

This is a moment of solitude. There’s comfort in the presence of the cat, joy in the singing of the birds, pleasure in the cup of tea, and purpose in the writing. The hours before dawn are to be relished.

Then the beloved comes to mind, and we realise that this pre-dawn time is a respite:

These stolen hours are mine. I can forget 
the cruel way your illness has progressed, 
the latest treatment and the latest test, 
the timetable round which my life is set.

It’s a love poem after all, not with mediaeval courtly love or the lusty ardour of John Donne but with the arduous commitment of an in-sickness-and-in-health kind of love.

Then the beloved himself appears, and the kookaburras announce that dawn has also come:

I hear your footsteps shuffle down the hall.
My time is up. I put away my pen.
Hello, you whisper. We begin again.
The kookaburras sound their final call

Until now the poem’s speaker has been I. Now she is part of a we. The day begins again, and so does the we. ‘My time is up. / We begin again.’ There’s resignation there, not a lot of joy, but acceptance.

The first three stanzas are all in the present tense. That doesn’t change in the last two, but they are in a different present. If you were reading this poem to an audience, you would have to pause significantly between the third and fourth stanzas – the end of the third stanza, ‘the kookaburras sound their final call’, may make such a pause inevitable. The major event of the poem happens in that pause. The next phrase, ‘After your death’, makes sure we know that. But the poem continues in its measured way: in fully rhyming, perfectly scanned iambic pentameters:

After your death I often dream I hear 
those footsteps and that whisper at the door, 
wake in a mixture of delight and fear 
but there is only birdsong nothing more.

You can just feel the self-control here, the stiff upper lip. The screaming and euphoria of the book’s title are deeply submerged, indicated by the comparatively plain ‘delight and fear’. In the first stanza you feel the speaker’s elation as she writes to the accompaniment of the birds’ ‘singing, / singing and singing’. Now it’s, desolately, ‘only birdsong nothing more’.

But life goes on:

Two years later I pack up my sorrow 
with all the memories of love and pity.
Dawn birds still sing even in the city, 
sing and sing as if there’s no tomorrow.

Those quiet words, sorrow, love and pity, carry enormous weight.

Perhaps because I read this poem after two weeks away from the city, when I was woken up each morning by raucous birdsong of a kind that we just don’t have in Sydney’s Inner West, I felt the sorrowful optimism of those last two lines. Sure, we have rowdy lorikeets and white cockatoos, even an occasional kookaburra, but it’s not the same. It’s hard not to feel a deep ambicvalence in the poem’s final words: ‘there’s no tomorrow.’

I hope this book finds its way to the many readers of her children’s books and historical novels.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read Screaming and Euphoria on the plane from Wulgurukaba land, beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island) to Gadigal and Wangal land where I live and write this blog. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. Because the excellent poem that begins on page 79 of this book continues for several pages, I have broken my rule and picked the single-page poem on p78.

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D G Lloyd’s Still alive in Dubbo

Posted on 21 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

David Grant Lloyd, Still Alive in Dubbo (Flying Island Poets 2026)

It’s poetry month in Australia. The Red Room Poetry site has a calendar of a huge number of events – at this link. In my own modest way, partly by accident, I’m participating by blogging about a lot of poetry, four posts so far and four to go if I can get my act together.

Still Alive in Dubbo is Number 5.

This is a follow up to David Grant Lloyd’s first volume of poetry, Alive in Dubbo. Like that book, it is set entirely in the New South Wales country town of Dubbo. There are memories of early childhood and schooldays, youthful escapades involving sex, drugs and/or petty crime, character sketches and street scenes. What I said in my blog post about the first book (at this link) is true of this one:

A portrait of the town emerges that’s unlikely to attract tourists, but it rings true – as if the poet has set out regularly with a verbal equivalent of a sketch book and come back with its pages full.

Page 79* is one section of a multi-part poem, ‘Sketches II’. Each of the poem’s eleven sections describes a building or similar location. The descriptions are deadpan, as if the aim is simply to document. Page 79 is ‘Baby Health Care’.

This is definitely the art that conceals art. You might read the poem and think that it has done nothing but describe a building – it’s factual, concrete documentation. But if so why does it leave the reader with a powerful sense of melancholy?

Across the road from Centrelink 
there is still something 
built of redbrick

If you’re Australian and know what Centrelink is, just these first lines are enough to signal misery. Centrelink is the government agency responsible for paying pensions, unemployment benefits and so on. Its standing in the community has been trashed in recent decades because of what is known as the Robodebt scandal, in which a computerised system went after perceived overpayments, leading to major distress for many people to the extent that some took their own lives. ‘Across the road from Centrelink’ is a bit like ‘Down the street from Hell’. Or perhaps, given the positive connotations of the poem’s title, ‘Baby Health Care’, it may be ‘The antithesis of Hell’. The NSW government provides free care for families with children up to five years old – what used to be known ad Baby Health Centres were a much loved institution. But no, ‘there is still something’: the more benign presence has relegated to the past – all that is left is ‘something / made of red brick’. That is to say, a building, just a building.

[Actually I had a look in Apple Maps: the building opposite NSW Services (Centrelink) is a Community Centre. A sign on its front door advertises a toy library. ]

A low stone wall out front 
well-kept lawn
Sometimes the gate is open 
sometimes shut
Hollow skeletal frame
tiled steps lead through an alcove 
iron railing juts out 
like the creeping thorn beside
Venetian blinds shut over the panes 
petition office space
an unplugged telephone on the counter
Vacant light

As description this is terrific. The image that it conjures up matches what you can see online to an extraordinary degree. But the emotive words that slip in almost unobserved do their work. ‘Hollow skeletal frame’ reinforces the notion that the life has gone out of the building: what remains – something – is hollowed out, the skeletal remains. The greenery is creeping thorn, surely an oblique reference to the story of Sleeping Beauty. The blinds are shut, the phone unplugged, the light vacant.

Not all the places that get a guernsey in ‘Sketches II’ are as desolate as this. There’s an adventure park, and the council chambers have signs of life. But melancholy is the dominant mood in this poem and indeed in the book as a whole. The last line of ‘Gumtree Medical Centre’, the book’s last poem, is, ‘My prescription need another upgrade.’ If that means the poet might find a way to be more cheerful, I’m all for it. But not if it dulls his willingness to look at things as they actually are and record them mercilessly.

I intend to pass this book on to a family member who lived in Dubbo for many years, and has plenty of stories of his own to tell.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Still Alive in Dubbo. I do subscribe, but I suspect I wasn’t charged this year. 

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read Still Alive in Dubbo on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island). I acknowledge their Elders past and present, including their sustained struggle to have the island’s long history acknowledged. I wrote this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, and likewise acknowledge their elders past and present. I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Brian Purcell’s Leaving

Posted on 20 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Brian Purcell, The Leaving (Flying Island 2021)

I enjoyed Brian Purcell’s 2025 poetry collection, Filmworks (my blogpost here). It turns out that Brian is not only one of the poets in the Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series, he also does some of the work of fulfilling subscription orders for the series. For $120 a year, subscribers receive a bundle, usually of ten books. When Brian was packaging up my bundle in January, he kindly added a copy of this book, his first, with a friendly inscription, and a limited-edition T-shirt sporting the cover of Filmworks, which I wear with pleasure.

The gesture is very much in the spirit of the Flying Island Poetry Community, which is all about relationships with a touch of the gift economy.

It’s a reminder that to read a book, perhaps especially a book of poetry, is basically to enter into a relationship with its author. The reader might sit at the writer’s feet to learn; might seethe at being hectored; might weep for the writer’s suffering or share in their joy; might laugh at their jokes, be in awe of their skill … the possibilities are endless.

Many of the poems in The Leaving have a strong sense of place, whether they are coastal New South Wales or places that the poet visits further afield. He makes an excellent travelling companion. I was completely on board when I read these lines in the first poem in the book, ‘Westerly at Bongil Beach’, loving the way they draw back the curtain on the process of composition. He tries to grasp the clouds, and manages to clasp a haiku, then shows us the haiku:

I reach up to grasp the torn dishcloth of clouds
_____-------______ nature's dictionary opens
______-------_____ I clasp a haiku

______-------_____ the sand-laced wind
______-------_____ keeps shifting scrawling
________-------___ you will never win

No shame in that defeat.

Another poem where I felt strong fellow-feeling is ‘Angels Descending’, which recalls an encounter with a nun in a Catholic childhood:

Is this the way you receive the Host?
Stick it out further!
She grabbed his tongue. 
He would never forgive that indignity
or the way the stiff white collar pressed
red marks into
her cool white skin.

Such an indignity was never visited on me, but I will never forget the rage-flushed face of Sister Mary Bride who taught me when I was five. The boy in this poem is eight, but his focus on the detail of the nun’s skin rings absolutely true for me.

The Christian reference in the title of the poem on page 78*, ‘Good Friday at Kungala’, seems at first glance much less significant. The poem captures a moment on a public holiday in a small New South Wales country town:

In the first two and last two stanzas, the poem’s speaker walks his dogs. In the middle two stanzas something else happens.

Good Friday at Kungala

Vivid new growth 
by the railway track 
dogs turn around 
to see I keep up

thankful for solitude 
rain never stops 
full moon obscured 
frogs croak at night

A man enjoys being alone, in connection with his dogs. There’s not much about Kungala on the internet but every general article mentions that the North Coast railway runs through it. There is no railway station there, and the first lines of the poem create a sense that it’s not a particularly busy line. It’s unpleasant weather, but not an unpleasant time and place to be.

So the next two stanzas are unexpected:

for sale everything not 
nailed down 
one man howling 
in ragged undergrowth

days to die alone
no one within earshot 
unless a partner 
draws the curtains back

The first stanzas evoke a place that’s off the beaten track. In these stanzas the speaker’s attention turns to the social meanings of that. Everything is for sale – the place is dying. The speaker is ‘thankful for solitude’, but his mind goes to what that isolation can mean: a man takes days to die, howling. The reference to the partner who didn’t draw the curtains back hints at further darkness to the story.

The abruptness of this shift is a reminder that poetry needs to be read slowly, creatively. The poem doesn’t tell us what to feel, but leaves space around the words for us to form our own responses. If the poem is a film script, the reader is invited to be director, actors and cinematographer.

rags of ochre cloth 
hang from the trees 
the dog drops its stick 
at my feet

stooping in the cold 
my arm's stiff and weak 
the dog outruns 
my most forceful throw

Back to the dogs and details of the environment (‘the rags of ochre cloth’ sound like something that just happened to be there on the day, though if you read the Good Friday reference as central, they might suggest the torn curtain in the temple on that day). The speaker is suddenly aware of his own comparative frailty and discomfort (cold, stiff and weak in eight words). But the vitality of the dogs keeps him pushing against his limits.

Maybe the Good Friday reference does carry some weight after all. A man has died in agony, and another man spends a moment reflecting on that. It’s a long way from church, but the Stations of the Cross are not completely forgotten.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read The Leaving on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island). I acknowledge their Elders past and present, including their sustained struggle to have the island’s long history acknowledged. I also acknowledge the Elders of Gadigal and Wangal. on whose land I live and have written this blog post. I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. Here page 79 is blank except for the title of the book’s third section, ‘Between earth and sky’, so I’m looking at the facing page..

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Click Here for What We Do, Pam Brown

Posted on 19 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Pam Brown, Click Here for What We Do (Vagabond Press 2018)

This book was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2019. I must have bought my copy around then. I put it on top of the high bookcase in my room, where it joined the hundred or so books waiting to be read, but unlike some of them (like Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan) it had a strong likelihood of being taken down again. Alas, a slim volume, it slid down behind the bookshelf, where it stayed completely inaccessible until …

… we recently replaced the carpet. We emptied the bookshelves, put their contents in boxes, and moved boxes and bookshelves to another room. The book and I were reunited.

Such an accidental journey into obscurity and back couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate book. Interruptions, distractions, accidents abound in Pam Brown’s poetry. As she says on page 47, in ‘Left wondering’, the second of the four long poems that make up the book:

my attention's
__creaky scatterings assemble

__ __like iron shards 
__patterning around 
a weak magnetic field

It would be hard to find a better way of describing these poems. To read them is to have the sense of being immersed in a consciousness whose attention is scattered – you can feel a pattern forming, being disrupted, re-forming. Each of the long poems is broken up into many short sections separated by an asterisk. It’s often not clear how a section relates to the one before it: it might pick on a word that appears there and criticise it; it might make an associative leap; it might not connect at all. The poems’ speaker goes on plane trips, re-organises furniture in her house, chats with someone over coffee, engages with artists, writers, essayists, and quotes other poets. She is irritated by the ‘nightmarish greensleeves’ of Mr Whippy. It all feels wonderfully familiar to me – not so much the content (I’d never heard of Agnes Martin or Luis Alberto Arellano), as the way one’s mind wanders, hovers. circles, and sometimes gets somewhere. And while it feels spontaneous and random, at the same time there’s discipline in the making of the poems: they are a long way from being formless effusions.

The four poems in the book are ‘Combination soup’, ‘Left wondering’, ‘Susceptibility song’ and ‘A mockery’.

Page 79* is the first page of ‘Susceptibility song’:

It’s a nice, cosy set-up. The poem’s speaker is sitting up late at night, multitasking.

past one a.m.
___ you will have gone to bed

The word you is always interesting in a poem. Maybe at some level it always means the reader. But it also usually conjures up a third person, real or imaginary. If you here signifies a particular person, the poem never identifies them. The effect is simply to place the poem’s speaker in a relationship. Francis Webb once wrote that a poem is a meeting place of silences: the first two lines of this one set it up to be exactly that.

The next section, the rest of the page, expands the scene-setting:

the night like a night
___________ some moonlight 
___________ some indigo to black

sporadic traffic swoosh
__________ no slower than the day

television streaming
___________________ comfortably

an average drama 
______ sound down low__________ 

not watching

reading bits of a book 
_____ making notes

I like ‘the night like a night’. It’s as if the poem starts out intending to give us an evocative simile but then thinks better of it: ‘Nah, it was just a night like any other.’ And gives just a little splash of colour. The qualifiers on the rest of the page emphasise the ordinariness of the moment: sporadic, average, comfortably. She’s not reading a book but bits of one. The television is on, but she’s not watching. It’s a kind of limbo.

A perfect place for the mind to go wandering, and an opening that makes one want to read on.

There are ten more pages.

First, there’s the book the poem’s speaker is ‘reading bits of’, in effect some of the notes she is making. She quotes a line from the blurb,’the discarded ideograms of history’, wonders what it means, decides the word ‘ideogram’ has been used incorrectly, explaining why in a two-word parenthesis – ‘ezra’s dictum’. I’m usually a pretty lazy reader, but because I’m blogging about the poem I looked things up. There are enough details to enable the book to be identified as Avenue (2012) a collection of poems by Michael O’Brien which is online at this link, so that we can read the two poems referred to by this poem; the blurb is by Geoffrey O’Brien; Ezra, of course, is Ezra Pound, who contended that ideograms were valuable as ways to resist ‘the lure of abstraction’, not whatever the blurb says they are.

But it wasn’t necessary to find all that out to enjoy the poem: the speaker picks up on the phrase, ‘the discarded ideograms of history,’ and the rest of the poem takes off on a meandering rumination on memory, history, time, the anthropocene, Queer Theory. She notices (is distracted by?) a spider ‘coating an insect in spittle’. She dreams, and watches TV. She gives some markers of time and place – including that she is writing on the night daylight saving ends, but at 10.52, a different time and presumably date from the opening page. She quotes, with acknowledgement, Yothu Yindi, Ellen van Neerven, Luis Buñuel and Les Murray, among others. Bob Dylan needs no acknowledgement:

tonight
____as I stand
inside the rain

irresolute

susceptible to uncertainty

She lists a number of terrorist killings from the news and then, in a piece of self-questioning that is quintessential Pam Brown:

does 
a list 
like that 
do any work?

____*

that's a question 
__ you've been asking
____for half a century

(wondering
___who'll be swift
________-to chide)

(This you is probably Brown herself, not the person addressed in the poem’s first lines.)

The poem is a wonderful ride, not really an essay, but more than a collection of moments or string of associations. If I seem to be saying nothing particularly clear about it, maybe that’s appropriate. Here’s how it ends, with a reminder that the subject it has been circling is to do with history, memory, finding a way of speaking :

the factual archive
the fatuous archive
____________awaits
the enormous familiar

begin whispering –

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the currently blue-skied land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Lee Lai’s Cannon

Posted on 16 Aug 2026 | 8 comments

Lee Lai, Cannon (Giramondo 2025)

Cannon made history by being the first comic to win the prestigious Stella Prize. Unlike other prize winners it didn’t take long to become available at the library. This may be because the kind of people who borrow prize winners from libraries mostly aren’t persuaded that comics can be a good read. There’s a chance that the luridly unpleasant cover art is a further disincentive.

It’s their loss.

The story begins on the endpapers, which feature a scattered mess of kitchen items – a whisk, a spatula, a saucepan, glasses, straws, broken plates. The next pages, the equivalent of a pre-title sequence, begin with a full-page image of a restaurant with tables and chairs in a chaotic overturned state. Everything is dark grey, as if on an unlit night, except for a score of birds, pitch black but with white on their wings, perched on the furniture. On the next page a lumpish person sits on the floor, wearing white and black like the birds and breathing heavily (the lettering, ‘HUF’ and ‘HF’, floats in the gloom around her). She is joined by another starkly drawn black and white figure, tall, thin. We realise that the chaos has been caused by the first figure, and the second one has come to her aid. The story begins.

It takes a few more pages before it’s clear that the lumpish person is Cannon, a woman, and the other figure, also a woman, is her friend Trish. They are queer Asian women, and the book is mainly about their friendship. Not to give too much away, Cannon has a stressful job as a cook, and is caring for her disabled grandfather (much of whose grumpy dialogue is given in Chinese characters and untranslated). The black birds are hallucinations produced by Cannon’s increasingly agitated mental state. Trish is a writer, of comics, and though she is pretty much Cannon’s only close friend, she is secretly creating a book about her. So this book is about Cannon, and about someone writing a book about Cannon, and inevitably about how Cannon responds when she finds out that her friend is commodifying her in this way.

It’s sometimes funny, sometimes sexy (there are heterosexual as well as Lesbian encounters, not exactly safe to read on the couch with children, but not creepy), sometimes sexy and funny at the same time. There are family dynamics, wonderfully nuanced portrayals of relationships, some recursive references to being a token queer Asian comic creator. The austere black and white is occasionally punctuated by garish red when Trish and Cannon watch a horror movie on television or in intense moments. So much to enjoy and savour.

In the restaurant, Cannon is the one who keeps her cool while everyone else is losing it. But we see the beads of sweat on her forehead, and the birds of suppressed emotion. The restaurant-smashing scene doesn’t happen until page 221, and when it does it goes on for nine pages, to this reader’s intense relief!

Here’s page 79*:

Cannon is going on a run at night, listening to a calming tape, with stylised birds in the background. If you picked this book up in a shop and turned to this page, and only this page, to see if you wanted to buy, you’d probably put it back on the shelf.

But in context it’s a different story. By this stage of the book we understand that running with the tape is Cannon’s way of staying on an even keel. Each time she goes for a run the narrative slows down and the reader takes time out with her. On this occasion, her grandfather has taken a turn for the worse, her mother refuses to help, and Trish’s sympathetic advice hasn’t helped. Six pages of her running are interspersed with other bits of story – Cannon remembers Trish intervening at school when a mean girl attacked her, Trish in the present does something that we only understand much later in the book. The birds are here, reduced to distant, barely noticeable shapes – the running is doing its job.

The art is deceptively simple. Cannon is not there to be looked at. The simple, elegant line drawings and uncluttered frames throughout don’t draw attention to themselves and allow the story to move along seamlessly. The plentiful white (and sometimes black, as on page 79) space opens up room for the reader to feel.

I wouldn’t have read this if not for the Stella Prize. I’m grateful.

I wrote this blog post on land of Wangal and Gadigal of the Darug Nation where just now the nights are cold but the days, as often as not, are cloudless and windless. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Jill Jones’s How to Emerge

Posted on 15 Aug 2026 | 3 comments

Jill Jones, How to Emerge (Vagabond Press 2025)

Jill Jones is a formidable poet, sometimes thrilling, often difficult, never cliché or dull.

Like many of her previous books, How to Emerge has won awards (including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2026 NSW Literary Awards) and been shortlisted for others (most recently the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, winner to be announced on the 10th of September).

Some quotes from judges’ comments may give you a sense of the poetry, and also of the difficulty of describing it.

From the PM’s Literary Awards (for the full comments, click on the book’s cover at this link):

Advancing by non-propositional proposition, chances and crossings, How To Emerge is an absorbing, elegant collection of poetic numbers operating at the threshold of the personal and the impersonal. In its richly suggestive representation of worldly entanglement, it solicits readers willing to enter into a pact of mutual attention and unpredictable exchange. 

From the NSW Literary Awards (the full comments are at this link):

These poems discover humanity, perhaps even meaning in the accumulating weight of the world; we are star dust, but we are also the brat summer. Part of the appeal of these poems is the rare faith they show in the reader, a belief that readers will find their own meaning and carry from the collection something of the warmth, humour and care that radiates from the poems.

I won’t add any generalisations of my own, except to say that I like the idea that readers have to be ‘willing’ (PMLA judges) and ‘will find their own meaning’ (NSWLA judges).

I’ll just look at one poem, ‘Poem Mourning My Name’, on page 79*.

It has fifteen lines. According to an endnote, all the poems in the book ‘are composed of lines that are multiples of three’. I’m guessing this was a self-imposed restraint, important in creating the poems, but not so much in the reading of them, unless at a subliminal, numerological level.

Before you read on, please stop and read the poem itself, preferably aloud. You’ll get a sense of its flow, its general effect, and if you’re like me, you’ll feel an itch to look more closely, poke around in it, figure out what precisely is happening. The rest of this blog post is an attempt to record some of that looking, poking and figuring.

When I was thinking about the poem, I happened to hear Florence Knapp discussing her novel The Names in a Sydney Writers’ Festival podcast (at this link). That novel tells three life stories, each of the same boy, but he is given a different name in each with massive consequences for how his life goes. And I realised that in various contexts my name has been Jonny, Jonno, Shaw, Shawrie, [offensive nickname deleted], John, Jon, Jacko (just for one weekend) and Jonathan. Names are important, and perhaps everyone can tell a story about theirs.

What if you’re called Jill Jones? I stopped counting when I reached the 200th person with that name on Facebook. This commonness could be what leads to the poem’s opening. Surely, you might think, if your name is a marker of your untransferable individuality, it must be more distinctive than that. In my reading of the poem, that’s the starting point – the fantasy that behind the everyday name there is another, ‘real’ name:

What is my real name, is it a name of the dead 
___ something to fling off like an old coat, a translation 
of a dream, a river, a fairytale, a rock or tree?

Is it too hard to remember, or a joke that's barely 
___ cute? Is it a message someone deleted? It's strange 
on my tongue, like an old lover, a lack of neatness.

As in many of Jill Jones’s poems, these lines are full of allusion. Some people are named after dead ancestors, or from a parent’s dream. Fairytales about names abound – I was just telling my grandson about Rumpelstiltskin this week. There’s a popular belief that in some cultures babies are named for the first thing the mother sees after giving birth – a rock or tree. And there’s a joke that’s ‘barely cute’ that relates to that belief – which I won’t tell here because I try to keep the blog family friendly.

While this play is going on, a different understanding of the opening question swims beneath the surface. Is a name something other than an arbitrary word used to identify the person? Is a real name an inversion of what the trans community calls a dead name? In the second triplet, that unease comes closer to the surface: the deleted message, the strangeness on the tongue, the awkwardness of an old lover, something that doesn’t fit though maybe it did once in a time that’s forgotten.

It is this imagined-forgotten name that is being mourned.

The next lines, coming after after a visual break, are a kind of prayer.

Call me by the name I was, tell me I'm part of a pattern 
___the constellations, some kind of DNA.

Was I once a fish, a horse, a sparrow, a red red rose?

The ‘real name’ has become ‘the name I was’: it’s more than a label, it’s a metaphor for lost identity, a way of understanding the speaker’s place in the universe, but one that’s in the past. We name stars by their place in constellations. DNA is a deep identifier. But the last line here does a kind of twist. After a glancing, fanciful reference to reincarnation, it pulls back from that rabbit-hole and allows a rose to enter the poem. In European poetry, a rose can’t be mentioned without invoking a long tradition: here the phrase is taken from Robert Burns (‘My love is like a red red rose’) but it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare (‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’) and Gertrude Stein (‘A rose is a rose is a rose’), both of which, with their understanding that names are arbitrary, oppose the main argument.

After another visual break, the poem makes a new start, perhaps responding to that skepticism:

I can breathe without my name, that's good, so it's not 
___ something I need tell anybody. Not even as a story 
forged awkwardly. And no-one has come anyway.

But it's still something to hide away, a riddle half-buried 
___ by a loch that's too narrow, too deep. Even underneath
where there are signs, there are layers and bones.

A paraphrase: Assuming that there was a real name in the past, I don’t need it to go on with life; I don’t even need to tell anybody, and that’s just as well as no one would want to hear me anyhow. But …

Is this what the PMLA judges meant by a ‘non-propositional proposition’? Maybe it’s nonsense to think I had a ‘real’ name, now lost, and that knowing it would reveal something essential about myself. But somehow the idea won’t go away: it lingers in some half-buried part of consciousness.

There’s a fresh twist in the last sentence. The poem to this point has been a lament for a lost name, a lost sign. But even when there are signs, it says,there are layers of meaning in them. (Which brings me back to the stories I could tell (perhaps awkwardly) about the variations on my own unforgotten and unmourned name.

Through all of this strangely abstract rumination, there are things: a coat, a river, a rock, a tree, a fish, a horse, a sparrow, a rose, and in the end bones.

We keep being told that there’s a crisis in our culture to do with shrinking attention spans. A remedy that’s often suggested is to read long-form writing like novels. A poem as short as 15 lines can also invite – and reward – sustained, active attention.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the currently cold, wet land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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How to End a Story, report 3

Posted on 13 Aug 2026 | 4 comments

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 354, mid 1988 to page 458, six pages into 1991.

Since my last nominally monthly report on my progress with Helen Garner’s diaries I’ve spent a couple of weeks away. The Garner book is completely unsuitable for aeroplane travel, so this report is running late and I have fewer pages to report on.

One of the joys of the diaries is the elliptical narrative that emerges. At this stage of my reading, it seems that the whole 770 pages tells the story of Garner’s relationship with her third husband, the novelist known in these pages as V. In the first entries she is still married to F, a marriage which ends acrimoniously, though by now she and F are friendly again, as he helps clean up a translation of Monkey Grip and attends performances by Helen’s daughter. Then V appears and is one of two men she is having a fling with. She chooses between them, realises she is in love with V and embarks on a serious relationship with him, guiltily because he is married. He leaves his wife and for a time they live together secretly in Sydney, where Helen pines for her Melbourne home and community. Now they have moved together to Melbourne, where she is much happier and he is feeling uprooted. In the last couple of days of my reading the possibility of marriage has been mentioned, not by Helen or V but by a friend – recorded without comment in the diary.

This compelling story is embedded in a host of sharp observations of the world, notes on the progress of her writing, the twists and turns of other relationships, world events, the writerly life.

In today’s reading the main narrative advance comes in an entry where V says he finds it very hard to work in Melbourne. An otherwise unidentified ‘novelist from New York’ comments that whereas ‘traditionally’ in marriage the woman goes to live on the man’s turf, V has left his own territory and come entirely on to Helen’s:

He has no family and no kids, he’s estranged from his wife of twenty-four years, he has sold his piece of property, and he’s here.

This is a sweet note that makes one realise that the many diary entries about quarrels in which V comes off as arrogant, patriarchal, dismissive of the woman’s point of view are far from being the whole picture. The move to Melbourne was his suggestion, in response to Helen’s discontent in Sydney.

And there’s so much else in today’s five pages:

Helen submits Cosmo Cosmolino to Y (probably Diana Gribble), her publisher, they have a laughter-filled editing session, then she labours at some painful rewriting, and is scared that with this book she ‘will come a cropper’. She sees a fine cut of The Last Days of Chez Nous, and enjoys it, then is cranky when she receives faxes (faxes!) ‘demanding further dialogue for post-synching’. She mentions writing a review of David Marr’s biography of Patrick White, and delights in her father’s comment, ‘I think the writer of that book will be … enchanted by what you said about it.’

There are events from the wide world: Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated. There are notes on her reading (The Diary of the Rev Francis Kilvert) and music listened to, reports on conversations (notably one about sex on international flights – ‘For once I was entirely innocent’), a death, a divorce, a bust-up with an important woman friend. A friend becomes a grandmother. Her friend J (evidently Tim Winton) is interviewed on TV.

I like to end these reports with one entry. Here’s my favourite from today (page 458):

Out walking as it was getting light, V and I passed a blackbird singing on a wire. A very beautiful song, melodic, generously paced, sweet. V laughed: ‘I build good nests. I find many worms.’

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Toby Fitch’s Ill Lit Pop

Posted on 7 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Toby Fitch, Ill Lit Pop (Flying Island Poets 2018)

There’s a thing in contemporary poetry where a poem is created by doing something to another piece of writing. A mechanical example is n+7, in which every noun in the original passage is replaced by the seventh noun after it in the dictionary. Depending what dictionary you use, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ might become, ‘Fringes, romps, courage, lend me your earshot.’

There are other, less mechanical techniques. In a cento, a form that has been around for a very long time, each line of the new poem is made up of a line from another poem. There are erasures, cut-ups, flarf (see Wikipedia description here), and more. They can be fun and challenging to do, and the results can be intriguing, hilarious, or sometimes just plain mystifying to read.

Toby Fitch does a lot of that kind of thing. His book before Ill Lit Pop was The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press 2016) – say its name aloud and you might realise that the book has something to do with Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. In 2021’s Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, my blog post here), he applies N+ 7 viciously to some Scott Morrison’s speeches.

Ill Lit Pop includes similar play. An end note lists ‘sources’ for each of the book’s 21 poems. They all do something to – or with, or through – other pieces of writing. The ‘sources’ include Kurt Cobain, Ice House, Taylor Swift, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. If my reading of the book’s title is correct, it suggests that many of the poems take pop lyrics and make them obscure, as in poorly illuminated pop music.

Probably the poem that speaks most directly to me is ‘Let’s Dance’ [or, as the contents pages puts it, ‘Let’s Dance (da da-da-da da-da-da)’], a more or less traditional poem responding to David Bowie’s fabulous video of his song by that name. It begins:

It wasn't Stravinsky's rite of spring
to plonk Uluru on his album cover
but it led Bowie to the beach-blonde pub
summer dance-off

To read the rest of the poem you’ll have to find a copy of the book. You can see the video at this link.

In the less traditional poems, I generally find myself bemused.

Page 47* will give you a taste. It’s the last page of ‘Evening of the Bot Man’, which has the explanatory subtitle ‘(A bad lip reading of Rimbaud)‘. The note on sources names ‘selected lines of Le bateau ivre, Arthur Rimbaud’.

I think I get the idea of bad lip reading. Here’s how I imagine this poem was created. Toby Fitch watched someone perform Le bateau ivre, probably in the original French, with the sound turned down, and wrote words in English that roughly fitted what he saw. Then, I’m guessing, he read through what he had written and selected the bits that looked interesting, tidied them up a bit, and perhaps nudged them towards some kind of meaning. Maybe it’s a process a little like reading tealeaves or playing with a ouija board. Or like interpreting dreams – the lipreader’s unconscious mind surely has a role in deciding what words to see.

I don’t think there’s much point to reading it alongside Rimbaud’s poem – I tried and failed. The title, ‘Evening of the Bot Man’, could be a tidied-up version of ‘the bot man’s evening’, which is a plausible bad lip reading of ‘le bateau ivre’. Such comparative reading for the rest of the poem would be a lot of work, and probably not very productive. So the poem needs to be read in its own right.

In the first four pages, nothing makes obvious sense, but there are some wonderful surrealist phrases.A random sample includes ‘tweeting pics / of the cooked black rain’, ‘icy poles exalting / among purple columns of lard’, or ‘July fizzing w/ quadrupeds’. But a narrative thread emerges from the apparent chaos. The poem is addressed to someone, and the speaker has done something he regrets:

a single sexy night saw me regret
___________________________the fallout of my life
's pleasure dome
__________________________u shivered non-plussed
the Furies all slow-clapped
our marriage

Such is the nature of the piece that as I read I wondered if it was me or Toby Fitch who decided that was part of a through narrative line. Whichever, oncec I’ve seen it, it’s definitely there, and the poem continues with self-recrimination and perhaps some excuse-making.

So these final lines, on page 47, read almost coherently, beginning with a meta moment:

_______love needs a narrative to absorb

People need narratives – and the nominally arbitrary process of bad lip reading has urned one up.

_______the moon is atrocious w/ its solar mains
you & i both know
__________________desire is beastly in the flesh

These lines invoke the biblical phrase, ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,’ putting it in an astronomical rather than theological context – the moon in relationship to the sun. ‘There’s a hint of forgiveness in ‘you and I both know’. And so …

& so we're content
______________all the better to awkward you w/
night-night selfie
___________________________on the bed next to me
_________yr disappointment eyes

The issue – arising from that ‘single sexy night’ – is not resolved. Things are still awkward. The speaker and his spouse have reached an awkward detente. Disappointment is still there, but so is contentment.

None of which has anything to do with the Rimbaud’s most famous Symbolist poem, whose surface narrative is all about a boat sailing drunkenly down a river. Rimbaud has provided the text from which the new text has arisen. If you can find the poem I’d love to hear other people’s readings of it.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island). I acknowledge their Elders past and present, including their sustained struggle to have the island’s long history acknowledged, and I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. When a book has fewer than 79 pages, as this one does, I look at page 47, the year of my birth minus 1900.

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Michael Wesley and the Blind Spot

Posted on 24 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Michael Wesley, Blind Spot: South-East Asia and Australia’s Future (Quarterly Essay 101, 2026)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 102

As I begin this blog post, the Guardian reports that Penny Wong will say, ‘We will continue to register our concerns about China’s vessels engaging in destabilising and dangerous conduct in the South China Sea, including towards Philippine, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Indonesian vessels.’

Leave aside the oddness of a news item about what someone will say about something they will do. Penny Wong’s intended statement sits right in the middle of the concerns of Michael Wesley’s Quarterly Essay.

Wesley reminds his readers of a basic fact, which he says is ‘our most profound and enduring strategic reality’:

Australia nestles at the southern end of the longest archipelago on the planet. This chain of more than 50,000 islands stretches for over 7000 kilometres along the eastern coastline of the world’s largest, most populous and richest continent: Asia. From the Aleutian Islands in the north, the great archipelago extends south through Japan, the Ryukus, Taiwan, Micronesia, the Philippines, Indonesia and New Guinea, to Australia. It then curves eastwards into the middle of the Pacific, through Melanesia and Polynesia. (Page 3)

Logically, what happens in the rest of this archipelago, especially in Southeast Asia, is ‘of overwhelming importance to Australia’s safety, prosperity and sovereignty’, yet for more than a century, Australian governments have focused attention elsewhere, and the population has remained relatively ignorant about what is distinctive about our nearest neighbours. There are two main reasons for this. First, other parts of Asia – Japan, Korea, and especially China – have demanded our attention. Second, modern Australia has only ever known a world dominated by a great power that shares out language and has similar culture, and we have cleaved to that power, first the UK and then the USA.

The essay explores both these ‘distractions’ from the region in some detail. There’s a discussion of China’s project under President Xi of creating a ‘zone of deference’ in Southeast Asia, which it has traditionally seen as its hinterland. And the essay lays out the way our governments, treading a fine line between massive trade with China and diplomatic allegiance to the USA, have increasingly come to see Australia’s interests as identical with those of the USA – the Quad and AUKUS are not the only symptoms of this.

I like this encapsulation on page 67 of some of the issues:

China has accused Australia of operating according to a ‘Cold War mindset’, seeking to divide the region and increasing military tensions. This plays directly into historical and contemporary anxieties in Southeast Asia about unwillingly becoming a cockpit for great-power rivalry and conflict. The increased presence of US forces and capabilities on Australian territory is viewed as bringing the possibility of great-power conflict much closer to Southeast Asia. Equally damaging to Australia’s interests is that it risks being seen by its neighbours as a spear-carrier for US policy – a particularly dangerous perception at a time when US policy is increasingly unpredictable and unapologetically transactional and self-interested.

Wesley concludes that Australia needs to take four steps to deal with dangers to its national interest in Southeast Asia:

  • Understand the scale of the challenge, and realise we have underinvested in diplomacy and development and focused our defence spending on capabilities that are more aligned with the USA’s needs than our own.
  • Fundamentally to change the way we think about our alliance with the USA – stop thinking about it as an end and return to thinking about it as a means. We can say no to Washington and maintain the alliance.
  • Start looking at Southeast Asia on its own terms. We must build a clear and nuanced understanding of the frameworks through which our counterparts in Jakarta, Singapore, Putrajaya, Bangkok, Hanoi and Manila think about the world.
  • Develop a new discipline in assessing challenges and thinking rigorously about their likelihood and consequences, reversing the single-view culture that has led to so much scare-mongering about China.

I’m a long way from being able to judge the accuracy of Wesley’s diagnosis or the value of his proposed actions, but this is a thoughtful and instructive essay that helps to understand the complexities behind headlines like the one I started with blog post with. I find myself asking: Is Penny Wong talking about Southeast Asia through the lens of our alignment with the USA in the tension between the great powers, or is she concerned about Southeast Asia for its own sake?

Correspondence in Quarterly Essay 102 (The God We Created by Anna Goldsworthy), which also appears on the Quarterly Essay website along with the text of the essay, kicks off with a spirited defence of the Albanese Government’s engagement in Southeast Asia by Tim Watts, who was assistant minister for foreign affairs from 2022 to 2025. He presents an impressive list of activities, but Wesley responds, doesn’t really address the argument that Australian governments have failed to have a thought-through strategy for engagement with the region for its own sake, rather than as part of its China policy.

The other responses, from an impressive array of academics and policy wonks, add depth and complexity to the argument.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation, where the winter is finally beginning to bite. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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