Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song at the Book group

Posted on 9 Sep 2026 | Leave a comment

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (Faber & Faber 2023)

Before the meeting: The Book Group is going through an Irish phase. Several Irish novels ago, one of our number said, ‘This is a beautifully written Irish novel, but does the world really need another beautifully written Irish novel?’ Yet that same man was this month’s Chooser, and here we are.

I remember reading a little about Prophet Song when it won the Booker Prize in 2023. The Booker then as now has a bit of a reputation for choosing grim novels, and this choice sounded true to form. I wasn’t planning to read it.

But, as has happened before, what the Book Group wants …

It is a beautifully written Irish novel, and an unremitting dystopian tale. It begins with two policemen knocking on the door of Larry Stack, a reacher and union leader in Dublin. In a reasonably pleasant chat, they warn him to call off a strike he is organising. And it goes from there.

The strike happens. Larry and others are arrested and disappear. More people begin to silently disappear as the government claims emergency powers, and key positions at all levels of society – schools, hospitals, local councils – are filled with cold-eyed people wearing party insignia. The Republic of Ireland becomes a full-blown police state, all as experienced by Larry’s wife, Eilish: first her husband is disappeared, then her oldest son goes into hiding to avoid the draft and we assume joins the rebel forces; she is pushed out of her job. Things get worse from there. The quiet suburban street becomes a war zone, and when the rebels take it over things don’t get any better. Eilish lives through all of this, while searching for her husband, doing her best to care for her three remaining children, and looking after her father who, symbolically enough, has dementia.

And it’s Ireland! Coming to it so soon after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing (link is to my blog post), where – in the real world – rebels would cross the border from Northern Ireland to find refuge in the Republic, I kept thinking it was an impossible fantasy: ‘It couldn’t happen there!’ But then I’d think of ICE in Minneapolis, and even the NSW police at a pro-Gazan demonstration earlier this year, and my blood would run cold.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there is no happy ending. With one exception, for which I am hugely grateful, any time I feared the worst, the worst is what happened.

As in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it feels as if each step in the destruction of a free society is something that has happened, recently, somewhere in the real world. It’s a deeply chilling book.

Page 79* is a nice example of the writing style. It’s one of those moments when life goes on despite everything – Eilish is helping her father get ready for a family wedding, and he has just said something appallingly curmudgeonly, in the manner of ancient Irishmen familiar from TV shows like Father Ted and Derry Girls.

Typically, most of the page is one long paragraph:

She looks into his face aghast and then she grows afraid, seeking past the face to what is changing inside him, seeing the self as though it were a flame respiring in the dark, the flame never still, the swollen flame tapering to its narrowest self. He is but he is not, this is what she thinks, and yet he seems to be himself again as he moves towards the mirror and she stands behind him as he studies his face, the skin pinkly shaven, a bleb of shaving foam behind his ear, she smooths it away with her thumb. She turns him around by the shoulders and buttons his shirt and loops the tie around his neck. It’s a lovely day for a wedding, don’t you think, they got lucky with the weather. He gives her a dismissive look and she knows he is himself again. That cousin of yours, he says, I cannot see her taking to the wedding bed. Dad, you cannot say things like that, Saoirse is your niece. Saoirse is a middle-aged woman approaching forty and her father is an ass, my sister never had any taste. Yes, well, it’s better late than never, don’t you think? She stands knotting the tie then pats his shoulder and lifts her eyes and something in the way he looks at her makes her think he is staring at his wife. She looks away, seeing out to the garden to where her mother stood, the climbing roses now ragged and slashed to the wall.

If this was punctuated conventionally, it would be broken up into at least four paragraphs. The dialogue would be in quote marks. Such breaks and marks would allow breathing space, but the overwhelming sense in this book is that there is no such thing: the forces of oppression and chaos are constantly closing in. Here, in their absence, the father’s dementia has a similar effect. Even the glimmer of relief, the thing signalling that he is his old self, is a bit of mean-spirited sexism. Unlike Father Ted he’s not funny, but this the nearest thing to comic relief the book offers. Then even that glimmer of relief is quelled by Eilish’s horror as she realises he is confused about her identity.

The final sentence, where Eilish looks out to the garden, is an example of a recurring motif. The book begins with Eilish looking out longingly to the dark of her garden. Her daughter Molly ties a white ribbon to one of their trees for every day Larry is missing. Here the climbing roses, ragged and slashed, are metaphors for Simon’s mental state – and the state of the land.

At the meeting: As usual we had a not-overthought and nonetheless excellent meal that included dolmades, pastizzi, some excellent salads, chicken wings and Aldi ice creams. Also as usual, we had a terrific conversation about the book. Everyone agreed that it’s excellent, beautifully written. Some couldn’t finish it because the way it chimed with what’s happening in the world made it unbearable. Some were alienated in some way by the focus on maternal issues. This is an all-male group: this alienation wasn’t about lack of empathy; in fact, as one man said, it was too much empathy that made it overwhelming.

We had an interesting discussion around the question, Why didn’t Eilish leave much earlier? There was an apparent disagreement about whether she was acting rationally or not, but my sense is that we were using the word rationally in different ways. Sure, it was 99 per cent sure that Larry has been killed and it makes sense for Eilish to save herself and her remaining children. But there is also the one per cent, and it makes sense to stay in the hope of reunion. Whether it was rational or not, we all agreed that it was profoundly human. One man’s Jewish grandparents had sent their son, his father, out of Nazi Germany but had stayed behind themselves, and been murdered. Like Eilish they knew the danger, but like her they couldn’t bear to leave their lives. (I should add that some people read Eilish as naively unaware of how bad things were getting.)

I floated my sense of Eilish’s father’s dementia as largely symbolic, less compellingly realistic than the rest of her family. That didn’t get much traction. In fact, someone pointed out that even though he was demented, he understood the dangers clearly enough and complied with his other daughter’s plans to extract him. Even with dementia, as a member of a generation that had lived when Nazism was taking over in Germany, he understood what was happening better than the younger ones.

Someone said he had enjoyed the book (if that’s the word), but wondered if its unremitting descent into chaos and misery really works. He likened it to Omar Musa’s Fierceland (which is on my To Be Read Very Soon list, and which he gave a general thumbs-down to), and compared them both unfavourably to Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip. His argument was waylaid by a dispute about whether the Book Group had actually read Mister Pip at some time. (I’ve just checked, and if so it was before either he or I joined. But I did read it – and I’ve just retrieved my ancient blog post that indicates I didn’t much like it – so I probably would have disagreed with him.)

The discussion of the book morphed into conversation about guns, pig-shooting, school cadets, the challenges of AI, grandchildren, truffle hunting, and (can this be?) not Donald Trump at all.

All the members of the Book Group are men of settler heritage. We met and 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.

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

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Bookblog #25: The Book Club (with addition)

Posted on 9 Sep 2026 | Leave a comment

[This post was originally published on 19 July 2008 on my earlier blog. I’m retrieving it here as Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip got a mention in the Book Group’s discussion of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song]

As I may have mentioned previously, our six-member Book Club has a general ban on talking about books at any length. The routine business of the evening is to swap books, eat and play cards, in that order. The swapping is highly ritualised: each of us offers three books, and each – in an order determined by drawing cards from the pack – borrows three books from the pool of offerings; before that happens we do ‘returns’ and ‘retentions’ from the previous meeting. Each book is given a score out of 5 by the offerer and the returner, and up to 30 seconds of discussion is permitted.

spare

At our most recent meeting, by tacit agreement, we didn’t play cards, and lingered over dinner instead. In a striking departure from SOP, someone asked, ‘What did everyone think of The Spare Room then?’ It had transpired during the swapping that everyone had read that book, and now it turned out that everyone had an opinion about it.

One person, who has made a film about death and bereavement, was intensely critical of the way Character Helen avoids facing up to death and her avoidance is not challenged by the book. (I actually think this is wrong – I read the last pages of the book as undermining and even invalidating much of Character Helen’s version of events.) Another, who had serious cancer some time ago, was gobsmacked by Character Helen’s lack of compassion – she couldn’t see how anyone could write such a character and expect readers to be sympathetic to her. Yet another saw the whole issue of death as the occasion rather than the subject of the book, whose actual focus is on the way in relationships between women expectations and commitments have to be constantly adjusted and renegotiated.

I don’t know what I think, except that I loved the way the book took a narrative about emotional subtleties and made something like an action tale out of it, and (I didn’t say this) I regard the scene where Character Helen sets out to reassure her guest that she hasn’t been a complete failure as unintentionally ironic – I mean, reading other people’s novels in manuscript makes a life meaningful? Ice-cold comfort, I would have thought. So there you go, Helen Garner got us talking.

I came away from the meeting with four books, the first of which was a retention from the previous meeting (I’d only managed 10 pages or so in the six weeks between meetings, not an uncommon occurrence):

Pat Barker, Life Class (Hamish Hamilton 2007)
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Vintage 1996)
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (Text Publishing, 2006)
Michelle De Kretser, The Lost Dog (Allen & Unwin 2008)

lifeclass

At the meeting, someone mentioned World War One Chick Lit, a genre I hadn’t heard named before. I don’t think Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy would fit that description, since quite a lot of its action takes place in the trenches. Life Class, on the other hand, probably does. The War doesn’t start until after more than a hundred pages of unrequited love among London art students. It does include graphically described mutilation and suffering in a hospital and nearby village close to the front in Ypres. There’s an ongoing discussion of how an artist should respond to the war, the main options being to ignore it because it’s just something that happens to people rather than being chosen by them, to glorify it (there’s a spectacularly noxious quote from the Futurist manifesto), or to do one’s best to tell the truth about it even though one’s work might be unshowable.

Even though Pat Barker includes an end note listing a number of biographies of artists who lived through those times, the debate pretty much sticks with the headlines, and the book amounts ends up being a footnote to the trilogy, a tale of young love thwarted by the War, not through the death of one lover, but by the creation of an uncrossable gulf between the two of them. Perhaps I’m missing something, but at times it felt as if there were two or even three different affairs being described: was her love unrequited as she felt, or his as he felt, or was she playing a manipulative, bisexual game as a third character claimed and was never contradicted. I didn’t know, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t really care.

0099590018

I loved Jeanette Winterson’s opening address for the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year, and perhaps even more her chat with Romana Koval on the Book Show, which covered some of the same ground. So even though I’d been largely bored by The Stone Gods, which I’d scored at the previous Book Club meeting, I picked up Art Objects  with hope in my heart. The book and I got off to a bad start with the epigraph, ‘If truth is that which lasts, then …’: I muttered under my breath, ‘If truth has nothing to do with lasting or otherwise, then there’s no point reading the rest of that sentence.’ But after that initial skirmish I was, alternately, putty in Jeanette’s hands and driven nuts by her indulgences.

The thread that runs through these essays is an argument for taking art seriously, for the need for the reader or viewer of art to work. This is wonderful, and there are bright flashes of insight on every page. She’s a brilliant and passionate advocate for things that are very dear to my heart, and yet … somehow her pentecostal rhapsodies leave me cold, and on occasion her self-proclaimed love for words can be hard to distinguish from love of the sound of her own voice. It’s probably telling that having read her lively, intelligent, lyrical essays on Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, I felt not the slightest stirrings of desire to read any of their works. Here’s a fine passage from the essay ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, that touches on the literature vs literacy debate (I still have my calico bag from the 2004 literacy convention, which sports the wistful slogan, real texts • real lives • real learning • real pleasure):

Learning to read is more than learning to group the letters on a page. Learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of body and mind. I do not mean the endless dross-skimming that passes for literacy, I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being. To recognise it in its own right, separate, particular, to let it speak in its own voice, not in a ventriloquism of yours. To find its relationship to you that is not its relationship to anyone else. To recognise, at the same time, that you are neither the means nor the method of its existence and that the love between you is not mutual suicide. The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealised world. Art is not amnesia, and the popular idea of books as escapism or diversion misses altogether what art is. There is plenty of escapism and diversion to be had, but it cannot be had from real books, real music, real theatre.

See what I mean? These are things that cry out to be said, but it’s preaching to the choir – and I do mean preaching.

On the other hand, how about this evocation of the context of her advocacy of the imagination, from ‘Imagination and Reality’:

Children who are born into a tired world as batteries of new energy are plugged into the system as soon as possible and gradually drained away. At the time when they become adult and conscious they are already depleted and prepared to accept the world of shadows. Those who have kept their spirit find it hard to nourish it and between the ages of twenty and thirty, many are successfully emptied of all resistance. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that most of the energy of most of the people is being diverted into a system which destroys them. Money is no antidote. If the imaginative life is to be renewed it needs its own coin.

She’s still preaching, but here I feel the urge to bang a tambourine accompaniment. Teresa Nielsen Hayden memorably said in her classic blog post, Things I Believe: ‘I believe we’re bound to occasionally confuse God with His creation. The part of creation I most frequently confuse with God is the English language.’ Jeanette Winterson should be forgiven if she occasionally makes the same mistake, and preaches accordingly.

mrpip

‘Why is Dickens a great writer and Trollope hardly a writer at all?’ was one of the stand-out aggravating lines in Jeanette Winterson’s book. It provides a nice segue, though, to Mister Pip, in which Dickens is introduced as ‘the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century’, and whose plot revolves around Bougainvillean village schoolchildren being transported into another world through having Great Expectations read to them – so that they become in some measure Jeanette’s ideal readers.

Consensus at the Book Club was that Mister Pip was superb. I struggled, and failed, to like it. I was uneasy from the start about the first person narration by Matilda, a black village child during the Bougainvillean civil war and blockade of the early 90s who falls in love with Dickens’s Pip and witnesses terrible brutality. The voice never rang true for me – and though some of what I took to be false notes (there’s a Somerset-Maugham-ish explanation of the suddenness of nightfall in the tropics, for example, as if Matilda somehow thinks of non-tropical experience as the norm) are accounted for by Matilda’s later life as told in the final chapters, I never came to trust the voice, and the book never made sense: the last remaining white man on the island reads Great Expectations to the schoolchildren, and when the book is destroyed by soldiers, along with all the houses and possessions of the villagers, he and the children have a project of retrieving the whole narrative; then there are some scenes of hideous brutality; Matilda and a handful of other villagers escape to live in Australia; she becomes a Dickens scholar, and at the end of her narrative decides to go back to her village.

Maybe my problem with the book boils down to its being set in a real time and place, but presenting a kind of allegory about colonialism. Monstrous things did happen in Bougainville in the early 90s while the White world largely turned our collective back, and Lloyd Jones manifestly – and laudably – wants us to acknowledge that. But, almost certainly in spite of its author’s intentions, this book (in my reading) ends up exploiting the horror for literary and, as it turned out, prize-winning effect.

lostdog

The Lost Dog, on the other hand, has a voice to die for. The phrase ‘jewelled prose’ came to mind: there’s hardly a sentence, and probably not a paragraph without a glowing adjective, a finely cut phrase, a many-faceted image or a sharply glittering epigram, though I don’t think you’d find any extended metaphors as laboured as that one. I was so captivated by the prose that I’d reached about the halfway point before I started to wonder if there was a plot; fortunately, just about then Michelle De Kretser started to give clues about where the book was heading. I remember someone saying of the movie Stand By Me that almost everything in it was there to allow the movie to get away with the one moment of tenderness between two boys. It’s not quite that simple with The Lost Dog – in fact, there’s nothing simple about this book – but after all its playing with time, its ruminations about modernism and post-colonialism, its playing around with references to Henry James (the point-of-view character, Tom, has just finished writing a book on James when this book opens and he loses his dog), it gives us climactic moments affirming simple human/animal realities. (The beautiful cover was designed by excellent blogger Ampersand Duck, who had clearly read the book. The book I borrowed is hardcover and a pleasure to hold in the hand.)

A general footnote: one of Jeanette Winterson’s tendentious remarks was ‘”Write from your own experience” is fine for the writing class, useless for the writer.’ Well, not entirely useless I think. Part of my difficulty with the Lloyd Jones book was that I believed the book when it was talking about Dickens, but not about Bougainvillean culture: I’m sure he did a lot of research, but it doesn’t feel experienced in the book. On the other hand, the only moments that rang false for me in The Lost Dog were those when Tom does something sexual when alone: as if that had to be included to make him a proper man. I’d bet good money, on the other hand, that Tom’s bi-cultural experience has a lot in common with Michelle’s, and that Matilda’s is a long way from Lloyd’s.

Addition: Tipped off by a review of the latest Meanjin in today’s Spectrum (supplement of Sydney Morning Herald), I found Ampersand Duck’s post about designing The Lost Dog‘s cover. It’s a terrific post, but I just want to quote this, in a self-congratulatory way: ‘For me, the most alluring part of the job was that part of my brief was to read the book properly. Hooray!’ I thought as much!

 

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Florence Knapp’s Names

Posted on 7 Sep 2026 | Leave a comment

Florence Knapp, The Names (2025)

Florence Knapp was a guest at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. I didn’t attend any of her events, but I loved the podcast of her conversation with Claire Nichols (at this link). Whether it was her personal charm or the way her book’s premise touched something in me, I reserved the book at my local library immediately, and behold, instead of a six-month wait, it was ready for me to pick up almost immediately.

The premise is straightforward enough. Cora, who is trapped in a dangerously abusive marriage, has to register the birth of her newborn son. Her husband instructs her to name the baby after himself – Gordon. Her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, wants him to be named Bear. Cora toys with calling him Julian, and escaping punishment by pointing out that the name means sky father, and so is a tribute to her husband.

That much is laid out in a prologue, set in October 1987. The rest of the novel tells what follows on from each of the choices. First in 1987, then every seven years until 2022, there are three chapters, headed ‘Bear’, ‘Julian’ and ‘Gordon’, and three radically different versions of the life of the family emerge.

Early on I wondered if there was much point to actually reading the book, once the premise was laid out. Maybe it was enough that the premise turns a spotlight on the ambivalence that I imagine most people have about their names, making me wonder, for example, how my life might have gone if, say, I had been named Arthur after my mother’s father (my father’s name was already taken), or something outlandish like Bandicoot, rather than Jonathan because, as my mother said, it sounds nicer than John.

But I’m glad I persisted with Florence Knapp’s story rather than my own. The lives of all three boys and their families are gripping, full of unexpected turns, each in its own way moving. The differences made by the different namings are wonderfully convincing, in big ways as well as small – from the drama of father Gordon’s immediate responses to tiny developments down the track. For example, when the baby is named on Maia’s suggestion, she forms a powerful protective bond with him. When he is called Julian, she becomes protective of her mother. When he is Gordon, they eventually form an alliance, but it is hard won. Taken as a whole, its a nuanced set of variations the theme of domestic violence and its long shadows.

Page 79* falls in Gordon’s section of 1994, when he is seven years old. Unlike the Bear and Julian, Gordon is taken under his father’s wing. On this page, father and son return from a special time at Pizza Express where the father asks, ‘What has Mummy been up to while I’ve been at work?’ Seeing that he gets an interested response when he says, ‘And one time, she said a bad word,’ the son makes up other maternal misdemeanours, including one that involves a stray cat. We fear for young Gordon’s soul.

Though I pick on page 79 arbitrarily, it’s interesting how often the page includes key moments in a book. Here, we have the moment when young Gordon gets an inkling of how his father is using him.

At dinner that night, his dad had brought up some of the things Gordon had told him. Not about the cat, which he must have known wasn’t true, but other things. He sounded pleased by the details, almost like he was teasing his mum, and Gordon had felt vindicated. Especially when his mum didn’t say those things were made up, but only looked at her plate, blinking, leaving Gordon wondering if she really did sneak bags of Monster Munch while he and Maia were at school; if she actually had used up his birthday bubble bath.

This puzzlement is given a nudge by Maia. On another timeline she is Bear’s besotted protestor. On this one she becomes Gordon’s moral guide:

Later, Maia had appeared at his bedroom door. ‘Do you have to be such a little–’ Gordon wasn’t sure what word she’d been about to say, only that it was a bad one. And that the reason she hadn’t said it was because they’d heard their dad coming upstairs. In bed, he had an odd gnawing feeling deep in his stomach. A bit like hunger but mixed with something ugly and sad. He turned over and buried his face in the pillow, trying to block out the memory of his mum blinking in that weird way. And Maia, glaring.

It would have been tempting to make young Gordon the replica of his father that old Gordon wants, but he is torn. At this point we feel the seven-year-old’s moral unease. In the last part of the page, Gordon makes a bid to break free of the destiny brought by his name.

The teacher is putting down a rectangle of card in front of each child, telling them these will go on the front of the trays where they’ll keep their workbooks and spelling diaries for the rest of the year. She tells them they should write their name and design a decorative border around it. Gordon sits for a moment, looking at what his classmates are doing, and then settles down to his own piece of card. Using his most careful handwriting, sounding out the letters in his head to make sure he gets it absolutely right, he writes L-U-K-E in orange felt-tip.

It’s no spoiler to say that the teacher doesn’t let him get away with it, but tears his card up, and writes his name in shockingly undecorated black on a new card. He is saddled with the name and all it brings with it. It would be a spoiler to say whether Florence Knapp allows him to escape or if she ruthlessly follows through on the logic of nominal determinism.

I loved that boy, and would happily have spent a lot more time with him, all three of him.

I am a man of settler heritage living on Gadigal Wangal country, where the days are suddenly warmer and magpies seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Magdalena Ball’s High Wire Step

Posted on 31 Aug 2026 | 7 comments

Magdalena Ball, High Wire Step (Flying Island 2018)

This is the third book by Magadalena Ball I’ve read. The others were Density of Compact Bone (2021) and Bobish (2023). Links are to my blog posts. I enjoyed those very different books a lot, so when High Wire Step arrived as one of the past publications included in my 2026 subscription from Flying Island, I was happy.

I still am happy. But I find myself unable to make any easy generalisation about the book. Each of its 40 poems stands alone and expects a reader to take time to savour it.

For instance, ‘Giantess’ is a monologue by the character who let Jack into her husband’s kitchen when he arrived from the beanstalk – beginning ‘I took a chance / opening the door’. There are a number of elegiac poems, and some enigmatic poems that seem to be childhood memories. There’s a longer poem, ‘Art of the Deal’, which begins:

While I grew up in lower Manhattan's
housing project
the pre-dawn cusp of gentrification
there was a shadow rising

and goes on to be a poem in which Donal Trump walks as he probably couldn’t in these Trump-saturated days. There’s a poem about the designer card game mille bornes, which begins ‘This is not a game.’

You get an idea of the diversity.

‘Trickle-down’, on page 78–79*, is a nice sample. It springs from a brief encounter – or even non-encounter – of a kind that happens often in city life. The poem’s main speaker passes a young woman begging in the street:

Trickle-down

The title suggests that the poem relates to the term ‘trickle-down economics’, government policy that favours the wealthy with the professed belief that the benefits will trickle down to those less wealthy.

What follows is not exactly a dialogue, but the poem has two characters. The first is evoked in the short opening line:

Alone in the cold night tin pot empty

The second, the poem’s main speaker, takes four lines to be introduced:

walking the streets, not as flâneur, taking notes 
going home to a warm meal, anger a forgotten luxury 
like a hot bath, starvation a choice you once made 
skipping lunch as an act of defiance.

It’s not a glib contrast between someone begging and someone well-off and smug, or even someone idly observing ‘as flâneur, taking notes’. She’s on her way home from work, and there are elliptical bits of backstory, perhaps flashes of memory prompted by the sight of the begging woman. Once she was angry and defiant, but never experienced deprivation except by choice. The paradox of anger as a luxury suggests a life with dulled emotions, where the person is ground down by life’s demands

It’s interesting that the phrase ‘a choice you once made’ is the first time a personal pronoun appears. Until then the two characters have been implied in the naming of objects (the tin pot, the warm meal, the hot bath), emotions (anger) or actions (walking, defiance, skipping lunch). The poem takes its time to focus on the people.

Once there was anger, choice, defiance. The implication is that these are no longer there. There must have been a point where that changed. Acknowledging this, the poem completes the introduction of the passerby:

Past the tipping point, your body becomes 
commodity for vested interests 
you can't find the way back

She is caught up in the urban rat race. I like the fine touch of ‘your body becomes / commodity’. It’s not even an individualised commodity, just part of a general substance.

In the next stanza, there is a different you, who sees the world from where she sits at the edge of the footpath:

safety is an echo chamber that crowds in 
as you beg a cigarette, a dollar
or to simply be invisible there 
amidst the shoppers in their fancy shoes 
and contempt, heading somewhere 
always in a hurry.

Now there’s an I for the first time. The passerby snaps out of her numb state and becomes the speaker of the poem. She wasn’t taking notes, but now she forces herself to look, to notice details about the other woman, to reflect briefly on the way the economic system creates such poverty, to imagine something of the other woman’s life at least in general terms. This mental act of compassionate witness is as important as giving money: 

I force myself to look though it hurts 
stuffing notes into your shaking hands 
your pretty face tired with lack of sleep 
the endless hustle
just a nameless trickle-down casualty 
though somewhere there's a mother 
in the cool dark wishing you were there with her
taking the blame for your absence
wondering how much further there is to fall 
and where the bottom is.

The final stanza brings together words and images from earlier. She is warm, angry (is it still a luxury?), would march (as oppose to shopping in fancy shoes or being always in a hurry), guilty (like the begging woman’s mother). She forms fists, whereas the other woman hands were shaking. And the opening words of the stanza echoes ‘safety‘ from earlier: 

I can't save you though I'd march across 
any road picket in hand to get you 
somewhere better, and here, in the warmth 
where I open and close my fists 
angry at my impotence and guilt 
am aware that I can't save anyone 
not even myself
in this beautiful, ravaged world.

The last line is a final harking back: the begging woman’s pretty, sleep-deprived face becomes in retrospect a metaphor (or do I mean a synecdoche) for the state of the world.

I think it would be a mistake to read this as a manifesto of despair. I think it’s more a waking from numbness: by allowing (forcing?) herself to feel for this individual, the speaker has opened the possibility of acknowledging what she sees happening in the big picture. Certainly, that last line feels like a door swinging open to a vast panorama: anger is no longer a forgotten luxury.

You can find out more about the marvellous Magdalena Ball at her website, at this link.

And that’s my last post for Poetry Month 2026. I managed to post about nine books (not all of them read this month), and go to two live events – the Red Room’s National Poetry Month Gala and the penultimate Annual Francis Webb Reading. Poetry lives!

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read High Wire Step on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island), and have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal country, which is just as beautiful but not as warm. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, 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.

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The Travelling Soul

Posted on 29 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Josh Stenberg & Lap Lam, editors and translators, The Travelling Soul: Chinese Poetry in Australia (1931–1934) (Flying Islands 2026)

This book is part of the Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia project, based at the University of Sydney. According to the project’s website:

Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia brings together historical materials from national and international collections in languages other than English. We seek to rethink and enlarge narratives about Australia that come solely from English-language sources, by showing modern Australia to be a complex multilingual creation.

According to its introduction, the book offers a small selection from the substantial body of verse in Chinese produced in Australia in the first third of the 20th century. There are 41 poems and a prose record of an excursion to Taronga zoo, all given in the original Chinese with an English translation and brief notes on the poems and, where possible, on the authors.

Mostly they are occasional poems – written to mark the arrival or departure of a friend or colleague, or to record an event of some sort. They also reflect on the political situation in China, and the experience of being Chinese in Australia. They come from sources such as Sydney’s Chinese Republic News and Tung Wah Times. Collectively, they give a sense of an active transient community of literate Chinese in this country.

An editorial decision was made by the translators not to attempt to reproduce the poetic forms of the poems. For a reader who can’t read Chinese then, the book bears witness to the existence of these poems while offering only shadow of the actual poetry. Here’s a taste:

There is nothing in the poem to indicate that it was written in Australia, but an endnote informs us that it was published in the Chinese Republic News on 9 August 1919. Unlike most of the poems in the book, it was anonymous, and there is no note from the author. The editors’ note, which refers to it and the poem on the next spread, gives us a glimpse of a community living in Australia but alive to a Chinese national point of view.

The Chinese, on the right, clearly conforms to a strict poetic form. There are four lines, each consisting of two parts made up of eight characters. With that in mind, I go back to what at first seems to be straightforward English prose on the left, and see that it actually consists of four couplets.

This makes me itch to do a version that reads more like poetry. Here’s a go:

We dreamed of peace and wake to sorrow. 
Talks have failed, packed up and gone.
POTUS sang a sweet love song.
Disaster from the east tomorrow.

Bridge builder, Robin Hood,
pocket-liner, power-grabber,
split our melon, feed the robber.
Our plains blaze. We must gather wood.

I’m not saying that the editors / translators should have done anything differently, let alone anything as rinky-dink as that. It’s just that while I appreciated the historical, sociological interest of the book, I wished I could have a greater sense of the poetry.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I live and blog on Gadigal and Wangal land, and gratefully acknowledge their Elders past and present, I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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Eunice Andrada’s Kontra

Posted on 28 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Eunice Andrada, Kontra (Giramondo 2025)

Kontra, the third book of poetry by Eunice Andrada, has won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry and is shortlisted for other wards, including the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Andrada’s previous books, Flood Damages and TAKE CARE (links are to my blog posts) deal a lot with female suffering, especially in the context of colonisation, with what Andrada calls ‘bare vulnerability’. Kontra‘s poems focus mainly on the figure of the kontrabida, the villainess in Filipino soap operas that viewers love to hate. It comes at the same subject from a different angle, and it’s a book in which the women fight back.

Whereas the soap opera (or teleseryes) heroine, the bida, tends to be virtuously well behaved, the kotrabida is ferocious and glamorous, though doomed to loss and humiliation, or worse. Andrada sets out to give her a fuller life. She says in an author’s note:

The kontrabida always arrives fully formed, without a backstory. I couldn’t find out what she thought by going off the information that was presented through teleserye storylines. Through poems that oscillate between her and me, I wanted to piece together her lineage, and in doing so, look at my own. I was thinking about my blood lineage and my poetic lineage, the women who have hurt me and healed me, and the poets who shaped me.

I have never seen a Filipino soap opera – the closest I’ve come is an event billed as a Bading Talent Show at the Marrickville Bowling Club, in which a number of men in spectacular drag gave off the kind of energy I now recognise as belonging to the kontrabida.

If I were to stick to my usual practice of looking at page 79*, I would now discuss ‘Speaking of Love’, which has the explanatory subtitle, ‘cento for women slain in operas – may you live in love forever’. A cento, as you may know, is a poem made up of lines taken from other poems. This poem does a beautiful job of repurposing lines to give the slain women an alternative, active fate.

But I’m breaking my rule to talk a little about the book’s second section.

There are three sections: ‘Kontra’, ‘Operá’ and ‘Bida’. ‘Kontra’ and ‘Bida’ feature the teleseryes characters. ‘Operá’ mostly leaves the world of teleseryes behind. It consists of a 25-page multi-part poem, described in an author’s note as a dyptich.

On the right-hand side of each spread, the poet responds to a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, with the introductory heading ‘[Florence, 2023]’. In case the painting is as unknown to you as the teleseryes are to me, you can see it at this link. It refers to the story in the Book of Judith, which is not considered part of the biblical canon by Jews or Protestants, but counts for the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

On the left, with the introductory heading ‘[Korte Suprema, 2025]’, poems riff on the subject of divorce in the Filipino context, and include personal accounts of family violence. The title ‘operá’ is defined on the section title page as a verb, ‘to perform a surgical operation’: some of the left-hand pages includes short instructional sections labelled ‘operá’ – thought experiments, perhaps, or magic procedures, or metaphorical surgeries.

The diptych sequence folds personal history, Philippine law, and mainstream western art into a single whole. For me, the Gentileschi painting acts as a bridge enabling me to connect with the world of the teleseryes, and to the book’s complex humanity, rather than leaving me on the outside looking in.

Hee’s a sample spread:

You see how it works. There are four components on the page. Let me walk you through them:

First on the left, 

D. EITHER SPOUSE IS OF UNSOUND MIND

The sequence features five of these headings, numbered A to E. They give the conditions under which a woman may remarry while divorce remains illegal under Philippine law: A, Death of a spouse; B, Presumptive death; C, Alternative reality (I’m pretty sure that the law’s term for this is annulment); D, as on this page, Either spouse is on unsound mind; and E, introducing the final part of the sequence, Leaving the country.

Presented baldly in capitals, these headings create a restricting framework. Each of them is followed immediately by a spelling-put of its implications, sometimes as if offering a subclause as on this page, sometimes in extended narrative verse. The brevity of the response on this page builds on the narrative of family suffering that followed ‘Presumptive death’.

d.1.
Make an example of me.
Make an example of me for eleven years.

It’s not clear who is speaking here. Because of the context, I first read it as the daughter of an abusive marriage where a woman is trapped. It could equally be the woman trapped in the marriage. Someone is speak back with passion to the impersonal legal language.

Then:

[Operá:
Begin an argument between an older woman and a younger woman 
about the psychological effects of oral contraceptive pills.
Record the conversation, then play the recording on a car ride 
to another state.]

In the sequence ingeneral, the bracketed instructions imply that there is always something one can do. This is the only one that involves another person, It evokes the massive generational shift from Catholic-dominated Filipino culture to a more liberal secular mindset. Oral contraceptives aren’t recent news, and nor are car rides, but here they both represent modernity.

All of that is very Philippines specific. On the right-hand side, the speaker continues her contemplation of the 17th century Italian painting. In other parts of the sequence she has contemplated the painting, identifying with Artemisia Gentileschi as a rape survivor who went on to be a creative artist. Realising that Gentileschi returned to the Biblical story a number of times, she has sought out other versions. On this spread, the right-hand side of the diptych sequence takes a metapoetic turn:

I write the same poem, around it, through it, underneath it,
until I can walk away from its every iteration.
I cleave the head of the poem and other poems 
sprout in its place. This is how we make sense of 
our lives when there is no justice. The taking repeats.
I enact the lyric moment.

Like Gentileschi, the speaker of the poem returns again and again to the same subject. Holofernes – now a symbolic figure – must be beheaded many times before ‘I’ can walk away from him. Cleaving its head is a brutal metaphor for resolving a poem’s issue – and I guess the process of writing poetry may at times feel brutal. But the subject stays alive through many iterations – or, in the imagery of this poem, sprouts new heads.

Gentileschi was raped as a young woman, and although her rapist was found guilty he was never punished. The poem suggests that her repeated depiction of the violence against Holofernes was a way of making sense of her life in the absence of justice. And not just her, but ‘we’. The I of the poem returns to the mistreatment of women and children – in the left-hand pages of this dyptich but not only there. There’s a fine reaching out in solidarity over the centuries and across cultural diference

‘I enact the lyric moment.’ I don’t know if writing lyric poetry has ever before been compared to a bloody beheading.

There’s a lot more to this poem and to the book. I’m glad it’s being noticed by the awards judges.

I am grateful to the Giramondo Publishing Company for my copy.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

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

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Shida Bazyar’s Nights are Quiet in Tehran at the Book Club

Posted on 26 Aug 2026 | 1 comment

Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran (2016, translation from German by Ruth Martin, Scribe 2025)

Before the meeting: This novel invites readers into the world of leftist Iranians who allied with Islamists against the Shah in the 1970s, only to face exile or worse under the rule of the Ayatollahs. Though it was written before Trump’s first presidential term, and Ruth Martin’s wonderfully readable translation was published before his current war on Iran, it takes on extra power when read in the context of those events.

It is the story of one Iranian family told in four slices of time: 1979, the year the Shah was deposed and the Islamic Republic was established; 1989, when the family is living in exile in Germany; 1999, when the regime relaxes a little and some family members visit Tehran; 2009, when once again the streets of Tehran are full of protests in the Green Movement, and the exiles watch the brutal repression unfold on social media. An undated epilogue tentatively suggests a brighter future.

Each section has a different narrator. In the first, youthful Behraz tells how he and his two close male friends see their hopes for a socialist revolution dashed, and though in his political fervour he believes there is no time for romance, he is drawn to the beautiful Nahid. In the second, ten years later, Nahid is married to Behraz. She describes their life in Germany and remembers the events that led to their flight from Iran. In the third, their eldest daughter, Laleh, takes up the story, describing a visit to Tehran, her first experience of noisy, exuberant family life, and the quiet revelation of the fates of Behraz’s friends. In the fourth, Mohad/Mo, who was a rowdy little boy in the previous section, now deals with the dual identity of dissipated German university student and Iranian exile.

Shida Bazyar is a German writer whose parents, like Behzad and Nahid, were communist activists in Iran in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution. They left the country in 1988 and – unlike Laleh and Mo – Shida was born in Germany. The book clearly draws on the author’s family’s experience, both in the youthful activism against the Shah and then against the Ayatollah, and in the experience of exile. Especially in the third section, when teenage Laleh returns to Tehran, the writing feels so alive it must be drawing on actual experience. (I’ll stand by that statement even though Shida Bazyar was born in 1988, so was one year old at the time of the fictional visit.)

A look at page 79* gies you an idea of the quality of the writing – including the fluency of the translation.

It’s part of Nahid’s narrative. She is remembering the moment when they decided to leave Iran, early in the 1980s. Behraz’s friend Peyman is visiting their safe house to tell them he has received a letter requiring him to turn himself in to the Islamic regime, which they all know means he is to be arrested for his communist activism. It’s a quiet, decisive moment in their lives:

Look after yourself, Behzad told Peyman – it sounded like a throwaway remark – and then Peyman said, Look after yourself. At least I know I have three whole days of freedom left, and you have no such security, comrade. His expression remained serious as Behzad laughed. We shook hands for a long time, Peyman and I, then Peyman gave me back the tea glass before putting on his shoes, his small, clean leather shoes, and once more he smiled before hurrying away into the darkness, as we closed the door quietly behind him.

The emotional intensity of the moment is conveyed entirely through gesture: Peyman has accepted the oblgatory glass of tea, but he has not sat down, and at parting he shakes Nahid’s hand ‘for a long time’. The door closes quietly behind him as he disappears into the darkness, and we know it’s the last time Nahid and Behzad will see him. (It’s not a spoiler to say that in Laleh’s narrative, when they meet up with Peyman’s widow ten years later, the emotion is much more on the surface.) The paragraph is also a beautiful example of how the novel portrays character. Nahid wants us to know that Peyman is anything but a performative martyr. He plays with children, and takes their words seriously, and when he is about to surrender himself to the regime, he manages a deadpan joke about the danger hanging over his friend.

Once Peyman has gone, the composure breaks:

Behzad and I were like abandoned children in our living room, which, although it was a hiding place arranged by the movement, was slowly becoming homely, with framed poems by Hafez and Rumi on the walls, and Laleh’s paintings in among them. I clutched Peyman’s tea glass, and as we sat down mechanically and the tears began to well up in my eyes, Behzad said, Nahid, this time we’re going to do it right, this time we need to leave. Then finally we looked at one another, and in my mind’s eye I could see all the situations in which Behzad and Peyman had sat in the midst of our friends, discussing things with serious faces. Peyman, the clever, quiet one, and Behzad, the one who called the shots, and the state probably didn’t care which of them it threw into its dungeons first, but it would only be a matter of time before Behzad got a letter, too.

That paragraph is mostly important in the flow of the novel as giving a flashback to the moment Behzad and Nahid decide to leave Iran and come to Germany. On paying closer attention to it for this blog post, I noticed something that slipped by me on first reding.

Nahid mentions Hafez and Rumi, two towering figures in Persian/Iranian culture. Her attachment to them was something that drew Behzad to her in the first place, and here they have an honoured place on the wall with little Laleh’s paintings – emblematic reminders that there is more to the life of these characters and this nation than endless struggle. Yet nowhere in the novel is either of them quoted.

A few pages later, the couple discuss a poem by Bertolt Brecht. The poem is ‘Thoughts on the Duration of Exile‘, but even though it is eminently relevant to their situation, it is only indirectly named and quoted. It’s clear from this and other moments that poetry is important to Nahid, and probably to Behzad as well. Readers aren’t given a direct look at any of it.

Then I realised that something similar happens in earlier parts of the novel. The main action, from one point of view, is the characters’ activism. Yet there are very few specifics about that activism: Behraz drives a car full of leaflets, but we don’t know what is in them or what is to be done with them. He spends time with other revolutionaries in a captured barracks, but what they do there is passed over in silence. We know that he is risking his freedom, even his life, but we don’t know what he is doing.

Some readers may find this effect frustrating or evasive. I didn’t. This isn’t an educational documentary about Iranian culture and history, it’s a story of how that history affects the lives of one small family – and by implication, many more.

The book was written before the Women, Life Freedom demonstrations of 2022 (link here) and its brutal repression. Things were so bad that in mid 2026 members of the Iranian diaspora in Sydney were demonstrating in favour of Trump’s invasion. As I was reading the last pages of the book, Donald Trump was reported as saying he would ‘beat the f***ing s**t out of Iran. The grief that permeates the book’s last pages seems more insistent and the hopeful epilogue more unrealistic with every passing news flash.

At the meeting:

It turned out that for a couple of us the stories in this book gave them insights into things they had been told or noticed about Iranians in their lives. And conversely, stories they had heard from those friends helped in their appreciation of the book. A small example: in Laleh’s section, Iranians presen their visiting family members with gifts in plastic bags – when this happened our group member’s acquaintance she had though it was just her Iranian family being offhand, but the book makes it seem a matter of cultural difference.

We were all engaged by the book. A couple of people – maybe everyone except me – found the first section, Behraz’s narrative, hard to follow and a bit boring. Weirdly, I liked his narrative because of its clarity. I think I read it with the utterly confusing opening of Sofi Oksanen,’s When the Doves Disappeared (link is to my blog post) fresh in my mind: I knew where the characters’ allegiances lay and wasn’t bothered by the lack of specifics about their activities.

We generally agreed that the two women’s narratives – that is, Nahid’s and Laleh’s – were the most engrossing. Nahid’s account of the experience of exile and Laleh’s wrestle with dual identity were especially strong. No one was particularly convinced by young Mo’s activism – he goes to demos about student fees and watches videos about Iran only because his German girlfriend wants him to. At least that’s how one person read him. My sense of him is kinder than that, and I found his section very moving as a picture of a young man more or less adrift from his cultural moorings, along with the horror of the repression of the Green Revolution.

We read the book along with Ann Patchett’s Whistler. When I blogged about Whistler, I mentioned that we did a little karaoke at the end of the evening. It says something about the difference between the books if I mention here that we also heard about the youthful political struggles on one member and current tribulations of a family member of another.

I read The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and wrote the first part of this blog post on Wulgurukaba country, on 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 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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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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