Lee Lai’s Cannon

Posted on 16 Aug 2026 | 3 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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Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

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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Laurie Duggan’s Kite Hangs above the Border

Posted on 22 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Laurie Duggan, A Kite Hangs above the Border, translated into Chinese by Chris Song and Matthew Cheng (Flying Island Books 2022)

Flying Island Books are published jointly by ASM and Cerberus Books. The first of those publishers is based in Macao, the second in Markwell, a rural community in New South Wales whose population in 2021 was 144. The series consists mostly of English-language poetry, but there are a number of bilingual books, mostly bringing Chinese-language poets to Australian readers. This is the second book I’ve read that reverses the flow. The first was Geoff Page’s Codicil (link is to my blog post), which was translated, like A Kite Hangs above the Border, by Hong Kong poets Chris Song and Matthew Cheng. This book, like that one, may act as a taster to potential Chinese readers. For readers who can’t decipher Chinese characters, it offers the intriguing experience of seeing what the poems look like in translation. And given that many non-Chinese readers won’t have read much of Laurie Duggan’s poetry, it’s a taster for us as well.

I’ve written longish posts about Duggan’s work here and here, which I’ve just reread and can recommend if you want a bit of background.

This book includes a number of poems from his two long-running series, Blue Hills and Allotments. Both series reflect the influence of classic Chinese poetry: they are often sharp, minimalist evocations of a moment in time in a particular place, generally Australia in Blue Hills and England in Allotments. For instance, the opening lines of ‘Blue Hills 86’:

_______________________a rectangle of sky
lights the kitchen bench

shadows of screeching corellas
cross this space

(Intriguingly, it takes 16 characters to translate the seven words of that second couplet there, six for ‘cross this space’ alone.)

There are satirical comments on current events, poems about poetry, travel poems, all quietly self-effacing and sometimes sharply witty.

Pages 78–79* feature one of the travel poems, ‘Catacombs’:

It’s interesting to notice that the word ‘catacombs’ needs four characters in Chinese, and that the last three couplets resemble each other visually in a way the English don’t (and seeing from a quick run through Google translate that this visual effect seems to be deliberate).

I thought I knew about catacombs before reading this poem. I’ve visited the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, Portugal (and ventured a little verse translation of my own, at this link), and the Hypogeum in Malta. Neither those, nor photos from the Paris catacombs, fit these lines. But a quick search turned up the Cappuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which the TripSavvy website says are ‘not recommended for the squeamish or for children’. It’s as if this poem condensed out of the air of that place.

If you’re not the squeamish type, you might like to watch this short video about the Palermo catacombs. But do read the poem first. It’s short lines – using fewer words than the video – create a visual sense of the place and allow its emotional resonances to hang lightly about the words.

The poem is in three parts. First, a general description:

They grin or howl, 
heads twisted from bodies

each hangs forward 
unsupported by neck muscle

There’s initial shock of the grinning or howling skulls. Is it that some grin and others howl, or is the poem undecided whether to describe them as grinning or howling? It doesn’t matter which way you read it, that ‘or’ holds you back from a pure horror movie response. The second couplet has a cool, practical feel. There’s a simple anatomical cause for the potentially horrible twisting in the first couplet: there is no neck muscle.

The second part notices the range of corpses. I’ve just spent some time reading about these catacombs, and I am in awe of Duggan’s restraint in not mentioning the child corpses, especially the beautifully preserved two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo. That would be a different poem. This one focuses on what amounts to class:

some in bow ties 
some in moth-eaten trousers

those in the professions 
have their own aisles

those of the cloth 
the darkest spaces

Incidentally, I ran the translation through Google translate, and the bot’s version of Chris Song and Matthew Cheng’s translation of ‘those of the cloth’ is ‘the commoner’, that is, the couplet refers to common people rather than the clergy, so whether by the machine or by the weird interplay of languages, class looms larger in the translation, or at least in the retranslation of the translation.

And then the observation:

all are covered 
by thick dust

The poem has no need to spell out the metaphorical resonance here (‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, and so on). As the US poet said, ‘No ideas but in things.’ The absence of punctuation at the end leaves it up to the reader – we can take it as implying a rumination on death as the great leveller, or simply let it stand as a tourist’s note.

So that’s a taste of a taste. Having written this far, I’ve picked up my copy of Homer Street (2020) and am browsing happily as I press ‘Publish’.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the 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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Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared at the Book Club

Posted on 21 Jul 2026 | 2 comments

Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared, translated by Lola M. Rogers (Atlantic Books 2015)

Before the meeting: The action of this book takes place in in two time frames: under German occupation 1941–1943, and as part of the USSR 1963–1966. In the first chapters, the Germans are seen as liberators from the yoke of Communism, but as the nature of the Nazi regime becomes evident, Estonian freedom fighters who have resisted the Soviets now take up arms against the Germans. And there are pragmatists who make themselves useful to the Germans and later, perhaps after a time in Siberian exile, manage to rise in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy. The book follows the careers of three Estonians: Roland, who remains a principled freedom fighter (though he tends to fade from the narrative until he makes a surprise reappearance late in the book); Edgar, who disowns his early Soviet identity to work for the Germans and twenty years later is manufacturing propaganda for the Soviets, with many betrayals in his wake; and Juudit, Edgar’s unhappy wife who becomes the mistress of a German officer, works for the resistance and in the 1960s is once again living a wretched, alcohol-soaked life with Edgar.

It’s a hard book to get into. The ground is always shifting under the characters’ feet, and the reader is often left partly in the dark. Here’s the opening:

We went to Rosalie’s grave one last time and placed some wild flowers on the grassy moonlit mound. We were silent for a moment with the blooms between us. I didn’t want to let Juudit go, which is why I said out loud what a person shouldn’t say in that situation:
‘We’ll never see each other again.’
I could hear the gravel in my voice, and it brought a gleam of water to her eyes.

There’s an awkwardness about the language that at first I thought might be a problem with the translation, as if award-winning Lola M. Rogers didn’t have a feel for natural English: ‘a gleam of water’ is an odd way to speak of tears, for instance, and there’s a weird, tight-lipped disjointedness. But the awkwardness is at one with other unsettling elements. We don’t know who the speaker is, or why he and Juudit are visiting the grave at night, and for me at least these questions aren’t definitively answered until very late in the book. This opening scene is the only one set in 1948, and only when I went back to it after reading the whole book did I understand that in characteristically elliptical way it fills in a lot of the blanks about what happened between 1943 and 1963.

The elusive quality is a feature not a bug. It reflects the reality of the characters’ lives under both Nazi and Soviet regimes: you never know who you can trust, or when you might inadvertently let slip some detail from your past that will incriminate you. The narrative is infected by this secretiveness. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but I came away from the book with a deeper understanding of the human cost of living under totalitarianism, and a slightly better informed picture of the history of Estonia in the middle of last century.

Two pernickety whinges. My copy of the book comes with paraphernalia designed for book groups – a glossary, a list of questions for discussion, suggested further treading, and an interview with the author. I found this vaguely insulting, like the time I went on a school excursion to see a performance of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, only to have my post-theatre rumination on the bus home rudely interrupted by the school principal quizzing me with comprehension questions. Please, let me just read it! (Less irritating but more pervasive is the use of US spelling – why, in a British edition?)

The Book Club meeting: As you can tell from the above, I wasn’t wild about the book, but I liked it a lot more than anyone else in the group. We discussed it along with Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. This book got pretty short shrift. If you love it, the comments are wide open for your input.

The three books taken together might have amounted to travel-deterrant propaganda for four countries, featuring terrible, ingrained violence in Northern Ireland, endemic mutual distrust in Estonia, wild unpredictability in India. and overconfident promises made and disastrously not kept in the USA. Our next meeting we’re going to Iran (The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran) and the USA (Ann Patchett’s Whistler). What could possibly go wrong?

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal of the Darug Nation, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal country. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and the book clubs

Posted on 20 Jul 2026 | 6 comments

Amitav Ghosh, Ghost-Eye (John Murray Publishers 2026)

Before the meetings: I loved Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy – Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire (links are to my blog posts) for their exuberant language, their array of brilliant characters and their remorseless portrayal of British colonialism.

Ghost-Eye is a very different animal. It’s set in the recent past and present. Its characters live mainly in urban India and Brooklyn, with excursions to a remote village in the Sundarbans in the Ganges Delta. The main action involves westernised characters coming to terms with a case of reincarnation that is gradually revealed to be something even more challenging to Western ways of thought. The academics who take the incursions from the ‘other reality’ seriously are described as being ‘woowoo’, but the book – in my reading at least – asks us to take them seriously as an alternative to the western culture’s extractive, reductive, and now catastrophic dealings with the natural world.

I found the book didactic, plodding, and often incoherent. I was unconvinced by the characters. Where in previous books Ghosh’s play with language has thrilled me, the one distinctive use of language in this book is an irritating attempt at a hip young person’s dialogue.

It turns out that page 79* is a good place from which to launch a description of the book as a whole:

Four of the book’s main characters appear here.

Varsha, the subject of conversation, is the book’s central phenomenon. The book begins in 1969, when she is a three-year-old living in an extravagantly wealthy, strictly vegetarian family in Calcutta. One day, to her parents’ consternation, she asks for fish and refuses to eat anything else. Fish has never been in their house, and none of the servants would ever dare to break the rigid prohibition. A doctor is called in, and after spending time with Varsha, decides that this is a job for his wife, a psychologist who has dealt with ‘several cases of this type’ – that is, he explains, children who remember past lives. End chapter one.

Back to page 79: Monty is that doctor. In spite of being the one who first broached the subject of past lives, he is the book’s main voice of ineffectual scepticism. Shoma is his wife. She has done a lot of research into ‘cases of the reincarnation type’ in collaboration with a professor from the University of Virginia, and she has conducted tests with Varsha that convince her she really does remember a past life.

The other character named on this page is Dev, a refugee from Burma who is a servant in the household.

After a long session with Varsha, Shoma has had a vivid dream in which the little girl came to her bedroom and stared at her through the mosquito net. When she wakes up there are three knots in the string binding the net to the bedpost:

‘Shoma!’ said Monty sharply. ‘Of course there are knots in the string. That’s what it’s there for – to hold up the net. It has to be tied, doesn’t it?’
Shoma began to chew her lip. ‘It’s just that when I went into Varsha’s room yesterday, she was playing with a piece of string, tying knots. Her ayah said that she’s been doing that a lot lately.’
‘What does that have to do with our mosquito net?’ said Monty in astonishment. ‘Shoma, get a grip on yourself –’

You can hear the Twilight Zone music playing. Not only can this little girl remember a past life as a fish-eater, but is she also capable of out-of-the-body travel? And wait, there’s more:

Monty was interrupted by a loud thumping on the stairwell door.
He went to see who it was and came back looking puzzled. ‘It was Dev,’ he said. ‘He wanted to know if you were all right.’
Shoma stared at him. ‘You mean he knew I had a nightmare? How is that possible?’
‘Who knows?’ Monty shrugged. ‘Let’s go and sit on the veranda; it’s nice and cool out there.’

Ooooh, here’s something psychic about Dev too!

Out on the veranda, Shoma and Monty labour the point:

‘I just can’t stop thinking about that dream,’ Shoma said, sinking into her easy chair. ‘To be honest, it didn’t even feel like a dream; it was as if Varsha was really there, watching me through the mosquito net.’
‘Now, now, Shoma,’ said Monty. ‘You’re just imagining all this.’

Your mileage may vary, but that reads us pure clunk to me. It comes as no surprise that Varsha does indeed turn out to have amazing supernatural powers, and so does Dev. Towards the end of the book there is a twist in which even more people recover memories of past lives and discover that reality is much richer, more mysterious and full of possibility than their limited western mindset has allowed them to understand. And in this discovery lies the possibility of averting the climate crisis. To which I say, Bollocks!

There’s a lot of power in the proposition that Indigenous knowledge and ways of understanding the world will be crucial in dealing with climate change. But to conflate Indigenous knowledge with acceptance of the literal reality of reincarnation, mind-reading, astral travel and a string of other paranormal phenomena, as this book does, is a travesty. It may be that the book and I just got off on the wrong foot and I couldn’t recover. Maybe it’s meant to be just a bit of fun and I’ve misread its tone completely. It’s being read by both my groups – the BookGroup and the Book Club – so I hope to hear from people it worked for.

Back to page 79:

Outside, as happened every day at dawn, municipal workers were washing the street with hosepipes, and in the distance, across the lake, vultures were slowly taking wing, rising into the sky, one by one, on an upwelling early-morning thermal.
Monty, meanwhile, was leaning over the veranda’s balustrade, waiting for the newspaper boy to throw up the two dailies, English and Bangla, that were delivered to them every day, both rolled into stiff batons and secured with strings made of coconut husk. Monty liked to think that if he succeeded in catching even one of the papers in mid-air, the day would be off to a good start. As for the occasions when he caught both, he would radiate good cheer all day.

This paragraph reminds me that the book has its pleasures, including a vivid evocation of places, but especially the Indian ones. This is middle-class Calcutta in the 1960s, where vultures catch thermals and newspapers are delivered daily. You have to love the detail of that coconut-husk string. And neither Monty nor I feel any need to reconcile his moment of idiosyncratic superstition with a hard, logical view of the world.

The Book Club meeting: I was the only one who had trouble with the book’s preternatural elements. Everyone else enjoyed the yarn, some as pure fantasy, at least one as playfully challenging reductive materialism. I’m left with the odd sense that I’ve misread the book, but can’t undo that reading.

Ghost-Eye was one of three books discussed at the Book Club. It will also be discussed at the Book Group‘s next meeting, which I will not be able to attend. If I glean any further insights from reports of that meeting, I’ll add a note here.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, 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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Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe and the Book Club

Posted on 19 Jul 2026 | 2 comments

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (William Collins 2018)

Before the meeting:

This book starts dramatically. A woman in Belfast, widowed mother of ten, has just got out of a hot bath at 7 o’clock at night when there is a knock on the door. Minutes later, she has been taken off into the night, and her children never see her again. Her name was Jean McConville, and her abduction – its context, the motive of the abductors, her eventual fate, the identity of her murderer(s), the stories told about it – forms a central narrative thread of this gripping, immensely readable account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, focusing on the IRA and Irish nationalism. It’s a gripping true crime story that unfolds into a broader historical narrative – though in his note on sources, the author says the book is ‘not a history book but a work of narrative non-fiction’.

The book reads like a thriller, though about a fifth of the book’s 512 pages are dedicated to notes, mostly naming sources but also occasionally acknowledging different interpretations of events. As well as conducting his own extensive interviews, Radden Keefe drew on an archive of interviews with IRA members who had agreed to be taped on condition that the tapes would remain locked away in Boston College in the USA until after their death. The final chapters tell the devastating story of how that condition was broken, and raise important questions about the control of political narrative.

A television series based on the book that aired on Disney+ last year has provoked trenchant criticism that sometimes spills over into criticism of the book. Timothy O’Grady in The Irish Echo (at this link) decries the way the series turns one particularly horrific act into public entertainment, and then picks apart Patrick Radden Keefe’s evidence for his solution to the murder of Jean McConville. The person Radden Keefe accuses took no action when the book was published in 2018, but is apparently suing over the TV show.

I suppose it’s not surprising, given my Irish Catholic background (as a young child I imagined my North Queensland home was a kind of mystical version of Ireland) that I was deeply engaged with this story. It joins what I now see as a lot of reading and television watching I’ve done recently. The characters of Derry Girls, which debuted the year Say Nothing was published, are in the crowd at Bill Clinton’s 1995 visit to Derry when, as page 252 has it, ‘people were everywhere, clotting the narrow streets of Derry, teeming beneath the arches of the ancient city walls’. The excellent police procedural Blue Lights (2023–) creates a version of what happened when the political violence came to an end but the enmities and violent mindsets remained. Seamus Heaney, whose letters I read recently (blog posts beginning here), is quoted a number of times – the book’s title echoes that of his poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, and a number of the book’s characters appear in Heaney’s letters. For example, Dolours Price, IRA terrorist and hunger striker, whose masked photo is on the cover of my edition of the book, married actor Stephen Rea and turns up in a letter written from London in 1986: ‘Will see S. Rea. And Dolours (I suppose).’ Given Heaney’s usual warmth, it’s easy to surmise that Dolours wasn’t one of his favourite people.

The book gives rounded portraits of many Irish nationalists, including Gerry Adams, who insists against all the evidence that he was never a member of the IRA; Brendan Hughes, a major figure in the IRA, who felt betrayed by the Good Friday agreement in which the IRA agreed to disarm; Dolours Price, a glamorous and notorious IRA member. As it happens, page 79* is part of one of the few stories from the other side. Frank Kitson, nicknamed the Little Brigadier, had served in the British Army in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and was an expert in counter-insurgency. He was sent to Northern Ireland in 1970 to join the young and inexperienced military there:

You can get a sense from this page of how the prose moves along. But if you want to check, there are eight notes at the back of the book relating to these four paragraphs. For instance, the narrative isn’t cluttered with the name of the ‘subordinate’ who described Kitson as the sun, but the notes and bibliography tell us it was Mike Jackson, in his book Soldier: An Autobiography (2007).

When Frank Kitson arrived, in 1970, he was not the overall commander of British forces. But he was in charge of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, which had responsibility for Belfast, and his influence far exceeded his station. As one of Kitson’s subordinates later put it, ‘Within his area of responsibility he was the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone.’

A good story needs a villain, and while Maggie Thatcher comes to play a villainous role in the hunger strikes, Frank Kitson is the main villain on the ground in this story. But he’s just a man doing his job, and he’s pretty good at it:

The biggest challenge facing the army when Kitson arrived was a shortage of solid intelligence. The men and women who became paramilitaries, whether republican or loyalist, looked like everyone else in the civilian population. So how to identify them? In previous decades, the membership of the IRA had been relatively static – the same names came up year after year. But the old police files were in desperate need of an update, now that there were new recruits flocking to the cause every week. This difficulty was only exacerbated by the blunderbuss approach favoured by the army. ‘When I was first there, the tactics were rather to stand in a line, pump the place full of gas, and let people chuck bricks at you until they got tired of it,’ Kitson later recalled. ‘Not a very good idea because the gas did so much damage to the local people. It made them hostile.’

As the story unfolds, Kitson establishes an undercover group called ‘the Feds’, who also ‘looked like everyone else in the civilian population’. Largely under Kitson’s influence, the IRA came to be riddled with informers. One of the book’s main narrative strands deals with an informer at the highest level, and one of its unresolved questions is what is to be made of atrocities committed by British operatives in order to maintain their cover.

Then at the bottom of the page, the picture of Kitson takes us back to the main story, and we for a moment see one of the main characters, Brendan Hughes, from an antagonistic perspective. There’s also a tiny glimpse of the general language and lore of the army, that reminds us incidentally that US movies, in particular Westerns, were standard entertainment fare in Britain in the 1970s:

In particular, Kitson was interested in D Company of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA unit operated by Brendan Hughes and the one that was doing the most damage. British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as ‘the reservation’ – Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all.

The meeting: After a delicious meal and entertaining general catch-up, we discussed this book along with two others. – Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh and When the Doves Disappeared by Sofu Oksanen. It was generally agreed that three books was too many, and I may have been the only person who actually finished all three.

Interestingly, some people found this book hard going. One person felt she now knows much more than she wanted to know about the IRA, though at the same time she wished she had read it before a number of encounters with a friend who was dealing with the difficulties of a childhood in the dangerous and secretive environment it so vividly evokes. For another the book only came alive in the last third, when the focus shifts from the violence to the way the narrative was shaped – and especially the extraordinary betrayal of trust involved in the tapes recorded and stored at Boston College in complete secrecy, until they weren’t secret any more. One, who has read a lot of Irish history, talked about the history of violence on that island that preceded the English invasion by centuries.

We reminded each other of moments towards the end of the book that are deeply moving – especially the discovery of Jean McConville’s body decades after her disappearance. We agreed that Gerry Adams, terrorist turned politician, emerged in a bad light. Though three of the five of us had Irish Catholic childhoods, the Catholic–Protestant sectarianism of pre-1960s Australia didn’t come up.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, 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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How to End a Story, report 2

Posted on 8 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 194 to 353, mid 1986 to partway through 1988

Helen Garner’s diaries continue to give me joy, five pages first thing each day.

A lot has happened since my last post. The character known as V has appeared and Garner’s relationship with him has become a dominant narrative thread. Even if a kind blog-friend hadn’t sent me a key to some of the people in the diaries, I would have guessed that V is novelist Murray Bail, who was to become Garner’s third husband. At this stage they are besottedly in love and Helen is spending a lot of time travelling back and forth between her home on Melbourne and hotels and other temporary abodes in Sydney, where V lives.

Other things are happening. Books are published and reviewed (she mainly quotes the negative ones). She appears at literary festivals all over the world and converses with the famous. She writes a screenplay, probably for Last Days at Chez Nous. A benefactor gives her money to buy a small house in rural Victoria. She moves out of the home she has shared with her daughter. Other young people come and go in her life. She has a religious experience and someone she calls ‘my nun’ appears. It’s hard to believe that this is less than two years in a life.

In today’s reading, there are 24 entries, ranging in length from a single short sentence to half a page. She watches Passage to India on the television and goes to the Australian Opera production of La Forza del Destino. She and a woman writer friend have an alarming conversation with an unnamed male poet about child abuse. She records a dream or two. She writes about the stars in Primrose Gully (‘How small they were, how far away’) and the ‘astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter’. (I just went walking in sunlit rain yesterday in Sydney in early winter, and I was astonished too.) She quarrels with the friend she lives with, ‘perhaps for the first time’. She records snippets of conversation, some overheard, some of which she is a part.

Diaries are often places where people write their misgivings and doubts rather than their considered opinions. There’s a lot of that in the entries about V. If it was a movie the audience would be silently crying out, ‘Don’t do it, Helen! Get out while you can!’ In today’s reading alone, she receives a letter from him that makes her want to shake him and fantasise calling it all off. She visits an art gallery with him and finds it impossible to tell him why a particular painting means something to her, partly for fear that he’ll tease her and laugh at her. She imagines him reproaching her for her reading habits. And she agonises over what their affair means for his wife, though they don’t seem to be able to talk about that – as in this on page 253:

‘His father went to jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’
‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’
Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.

But every now and then, almost by accident, we get a glimpse of why she’s in the relationship:

In Neilsen Park the astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter: tremendous towers of cloud coloured delicately in greys and pinks, boats sliding or toiling, clear cool air. How can that hard-looking mouth be so soft?

I believe Garner when she says she didn’t alter the text of these diaries except to protect people’s identities (though not all the identities are well protected). I expect that she left entries things out. I’m in awe of her moral fortitude in deciding over and over again what to leave in.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the astonishingly beautiful 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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