Category Archives: Page 76

Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place at the book group

Posted on 29 November 2023 | 5 comments

Debra Dank, We Come with This Place (Echo Publishing 2022)

Before the meeting: We Come With This Place won an amazing four prizes at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards this year, including Book of the Year: you can read the judges’ comments here and here. They include this:

This sensational memoir is an unheralded reflection on what it is to be First Nations in Australia, and on the very deepest meanings of family and belonging.

In one of her modest acceptance speeches at the awards ceremony, Debra Dank mentioned that the book started out as part of her PhD study. In the Preface, she elaborates:

I wanted to show how story works in my community and how it has contributed to our living with country for so long. It seemed to me imperative to talk about those voices, both human and non-human, who guided Gudanji for centuries before anyone else stepped onto this land.

(page viii)

The weeks after the referendum on the Voice failed seemed a perfect time to read this book. The Uluṟu Statement from the Heart’s call for Voice, Truth, Treaty has been rejected at the political level: it’s a relief to listen to the voices of First Nations writers like Debra Dank, and participate in this form of truth-telling.

It’s a terrific book: an intimate portrait of family life, placed in the context of ancestral stories, a deep sense of connection to Country, and resilience in the face of the horrors of colonialism. The family lived ‘under the Act’ in Queensland, and managed ingeniously to hide little Debra when the Welfare came looking for light-skinned children; her father worked on a number of rural properties, where sometimes he was treated with great respect, other times not so much. She helps her father work on a windmill. There is a tactfully written scene where she stands up against family violence, and magical moments with her grandfather, and with her children and grandchildren. I love the pages where Dank’s white surfie husband (he’s saltwater, she’s dust) struggles to learn how to read the bush, to see the things that are glaringly obvious to his Aboriginal children.

Dank identifies as belonging to dry country, and she makes brilliant use of images of dust. On the very first page, ‘vague images try to speak to [her] through dust motes rising from the thick pale pages’ of a 400-year-old edition of a book by Aristotle, and a few pages later, she tells us that the stories of her people – the Gudanji kujiga – ‘grow from the fine dirt that plays around your feet and makes the dust that rolls over the the vast Gudanji and Wakaja country’. As a child she is fascinated by the way a drop of blood from a foot caught on barbed wire blends into the soil. Dust rises from the heels of a family group in the not so distant past running in terror from armed men on horseback. It memorably obliterates the Country-scarring road in the passage I versified the other day (here).

I don’t want to give the impression that the book is written in high metaphorical mode. Here’s a little passage from page 76 (for those who came in late, I like to have a closer look at that page because it’s my age). The family are driving from one place of employment to another, and appropriately enough the page starts with dust:

The wind brought dust in with it, but it was the Dry and the road wasn’t too bad. The caravan happily kicked up dust into frothing red feathers that followed us for a bit, then settled back onto the road. Long stalks of tall yellow grass formed a guard of honour as we traveled across the plains. We played games of spot the turkey and several times tried desperately to convince Dad to stop for the goannas that would run across the road and then lie still and flat in the shelter of the yellow grass and amber shadows, but we needed to get there so he didn’t stop. Besides, Mum said she refused to turn up at the new station with a dead gonna in the car.

You see what I mean: if you’re not alert to the dust motif, those frothing red feathers that follow and settle are a nice piece of decoration; if you’ve picked up on it, they’re a reassuring presence of Country. And this tiny moment embodies the way the family manages to live successfully in two worlds: goannas would be great, but not when you’re about to meet a new white boss.

After the meeting: It was our end-of-year meeting, so as well as discussing the book, we exchanged gifts – of books chosen from our bookshelves. I gave Diana Athill’s wonderful memoir, Somewhere Towards the End, and scored J M Coetzee’s 1986 novel, Foe. We also, in a three-year tradition, each brought a poem to read to the group: poems represented included Seamus Heaney, Oodgeroo Noonuccal writing as Kath Walker, Adrian Wiggins, J Drew Lanham, Rosda Hayes, and Sean Hughes.

There were seven of us. Two hadn’t read the book – it’s a busy time of year. One was ‘at about 55 percent’ on his device. One said he had read seven other books since so had difficulty recalling it with any clarity. We were in a pub rather than our usual domestic setting. None of that stopped the conversation from delving into the book, ranging widely and then finding its way back to the page. Those of us who had read it celebrated the way it presented the history from inside an First Nations point of view: even Kim Scott’s brilliant novel That Deadman Dance didn’t get to the inside story as completely as this; and it has a calm assurance that, say, Julie Janson’s Benevolence lacks, for all its other strengths (the second of these comparison came up in conversation in the car ride home).

One Covid-ed absentee emailed in some cogent comments – noting that there seemed to be a number of voices, and that the passages dealing with the author’s personal experience worked better than the narration of ancient stories. He loved, and others agreed, the bits of bushcraft such as reading shadows and catching fish with your hands in the desert, the cultural landscape connections.

I went on a bit about dust.

There was a lot of reflection on personal experiences the book reminded people of. There was also, as usual, much excellent conversation about unrelated matters, including Anna Funder’s Wifedom; the recent blockade in Newcastle and a similar one nearly 20 years ago which provoked a very different response from the police and the press; philosophy and poetry groups in a small town; behind the scenes stories from a fascinating film project; travellers’ tales.

And that’s a wrap for the Book Group for 2023.

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Kim Cheng Boey’s Singer

Posted on 9 November 2023 | Leave a comment

Kim Cheng Boey, The Singer (Cordite Press 2022)

There’s so much to love in this book.

I was inclined to love it sight unseen. I’ve been delighted by Kim Cheng Boey’s readings in past years when the Sydney Writers’ Festival had room for local poets. He co-edited (with Michelle Cahill and Adam Aitken) the excellent 2013 anthology, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. He has written insightful reviews of one of my favourite poets, Eileen Chong, and had a walk-on role in one of her poems. This is the first of his books that I have read.

When I got my copy direct from Cordite Press – I tried at least three bookshops – I loved it for the cover alone. You expect the title The Singer to refer to the poet, perhaps in an attention-seeking way, but then you tilt the book and see the cover image clearly: it’s a Singer sewing machine. (My mother didn’t call her labour-saving devices the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner or the sewing machine, but the Hoover, the Electrolux and the Singer.) It’s a brilliant title: yes, poetry is like song, but it’s also craft.

And page by page, I kept on falling in love. There’s a Preface in which Kim Cheng writes of the different ‘weight’ of his poetry-making over time:

When I was younger, poetry carried me posthaste, high on the fuel of experience and freshness of thought, from initial impulse to final form. In middle age the roles are reversed – I am the mule, the porter, learning the weight and heft of the poem so I can carry it long-distance – over months and often years.

‘Perhaps,’ he continues, ‘the change occurred the moment I became a migrant.’ He migrated to Australia from his native Singapore in his early 30s, in 1997. Since then he has continued to take part in Singapore’s literary and cultural life as well as that of his adopted home. The book’s three parts can be read as tracing this geographical movement over time. The first, ‘Little India Dreaming’, has five long prose poems full of the smells and sights and sounds of a remembered Singapore childhood, including the title poem. Here’s a small extract to give you a feel for it: 

You almost pray to the Singer, its dark cast-iron hull, to 
carry your mother's song. You pray for the treadle to 
stir, for the finished dress to be unstitched, its seams 
unpicked so the dress can materialise again from the 
chalk outline. You take the birthday outfit out of the 
wardrobe of forgetting and become the five-year-old 
wearing your mother's love.

The second section, ‘The Middle Distance’, is introduced with a quote from Louis Mac Neice, ‘This middle stretch / Of life is bad for poets.’ Each of its five poems is set in places other than Asia or Australia., and it’s tempting to see an unsettled, midlife quality to them.

The seven poems of the third section, ‘Sydney Dreaming’ – to simplify appallingly – lay claim to Australia as a place that can be called home.

My arbitrary blogging practice of looking at page 76 has once again given me a gift. That page occurs near the end of the book, in ‘Sydney Dreaming’, the title poem of the third section.

I love this poem (I know I’m using that word a lot, but it can’t be helped). In it the speaker walks around inner suburbs of Sydney, haunted by the tales and memories of other cities and ghosts of Sydney past. If it was terrible, banal rubbish, I might still have loved it because I have walked every step that the poem follows. I too lament the disappearance of second-hand book shops in Pitt Street. I know the painted up man with the didgeridoo in the Central tunnel, as well as the old Chinese man ‘scraping a dirge on his erdu’. Chinatown, Broadway, Glebe Point Road, Gleebooks, all lovingly named and recognisable. Then Darlinghurst Road, the wall, the Holocaust Museum, Macleay Street. The poem made me want to go for a long walk.

And it’s a terrific poem. Here are a couple of stanzas from page 76 – the walk down to Woolloomooloo from Kings Cross:

You follow the bend and the view opens to the ivory cusps 
of the Opera House and the dark arch of the bridge over the silver-glazed
azure scroll of the harbour, the sky burnished gold in the last exhalations of the sun.

Soon the flying fox formations will rise from hangars of Moreton Bay figs
in the Botanic Garden, and weave arabesques around the halo 
of the spanning arches of the Coathanger. You remember seeing this even
before you arrived, memory in the image, image in memory,

the sky and the harbour dyed incarnadine in the first postcard 
you ever received from a childhood friend settled in a new life

Notice that it’s in the second person: ‘You follow the bend.’ The poem’s speaker isn’t just telling the reader about a walk he has taken, he is inviting us to walk with him – which is especially effective for readers who have in fact walked in those places. The long lines have a leisurely, strolling feel: no hurry, no need to reach any rhyming points or keep to any metric timetable. The conversational tone and language creates a companionable feel.

Then the register shifts, as the poem enters its final movement.

You follow the bend and the language opens to ‘ivory cusps’ and ‘silver-glazed azure’ and ‘burnished gold’ and ‘exhalations of the sun’. That’s such a Sydney moment – any Sydneysider arriving at Circular Quay train station will have had their phone-absorption interrupted by the exclamations of tourists seeing the Bridge–Harbour–Opera House scene for the first time. Rounding that bend in Woolloomooloo has a similar breathtaking effect, and the language responds.

Then two things happen. First, the speaker asserts that he belongs here by looking forward in time: he knows that the flying foxes will soon fill the sky and enjoys anticipating the spectacle (still with the elevated language, ‘arabesques’ and ‘spanning arches’). Second, he knows that he hasn’t always belonged, and memory asserts itself. He had seen this sight in a postcard long before seeing the actual thing. I’m reminded of those passages in Proust about how the reality inevitably falls short of the anticipated image. That’s not how it is here, but there’s a strange unreality nonetheless – ‘memory in the image, image in memory’ – the present moment is a palimpsest. The whole poem revolves around that interplay of past, present, anticipated future and imagination. The whole walk is experienced as a palimpsest.

I’m restraining myself from quoting the lines that come next, because it’s getting close to the poem’s stunning conclusion, and even with poetry spoilers are an issue. Enough to say that the Bridge is transformed effortlessly from that spectacular postcard image to a terrific metaphor for the poet’s status in the midst of an ever-changing life of exile, belonging, and longing.

As a footnote: the title ‘Sydney Dreaming’ might be a worry. I don’t read it as claiming any of the First Nations meaning of the word ‘Dreaming’. In the course of his walk, the poet-flâneur passes a number of First Nations people: the man in the Central tunnel, and a real or imagined group of dancers in Woolloomooloo. The latter are mentioned after the speaker has been lost ‘in a dream of home, almost’: his dream is definitely lower case, and carefully distinct from that other, deeper, ancestral Dreaming.

The Singer won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry earlier this year (click here for the judges’ comments). Maybe it’s so hard to find in the bookshops because it sells out as soon as it hits the shelves. I hope so. Anyhow, especially but not only if you live in Sydney or are part of a Chinese diaspora, see if you can get hold of it. Did I mention that I love it?

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Thrity Umrigar’s Space Between Us

Posted on 31 October 2023 | 7 comments

Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us (©2005, Harper Perennial 2007)

Bhima is a domestic servant in Mumbai – or Bombay, as she calls it. She has been with the same Parsi family for decades. She can’t sit on the family’s furniture, and physical contact is avoided, but she and the woman of the house – Sera, whom Bhima cannot think of without the respectful suffix ‘-bai’ – have formed close bonds. Bhima is the only person in whom Sera has been able to confide about her husband’s violence, and Sera has paid for the education of Bhima’s granddaughter, Maya.

When the novel opens, Bhima is living with teenage Maya in a hut in the slums. We gradually learn that Maya’s parents died of AIDS when she was seven years old, that Bhima’s husband left her decades ago in tragic circumstances, that Sera’s husband has recently died. In the present, Sera’s daughter is pregnant and her relationship with her charming husband is a bright spot in everyone’s lives. To Bhima’s shame and fury, Maya is also pregnant, and the action in the novel’s present revolves around the father’s identity.

It’s Thrity Umrigar’s tribute to ‘the real Bhima’, who was a servant in her wealthy Parsi childhood home in Mumbai. But having established the bonds of affection and mutuality between the two families, the book turns, and becomes a brilliant study of the way relationships can be close and strong but in the end tragically vulnerable to social norms and structures.

I read this book after The Secrets Between Us, a sequel published 13 years later. This isn’t something I’d recommend. On the one hand it was interesting to see passing mention of Parvati, a major character in the second book, to have the stories of Bhima’s husband and daughter dramatically realised, and to come to a fuller understanding of the ending of the second novel. But the major thunderclap reveal of the identity of the man who got Maya pregnant comes as no surprise, and it was odd to know better than all the characters when there was very little foreshadowing.

A strong point in both books is the way they enact the fine detail of changing culture. Sera, like Thrity Umrigar, is Parsi, and the book’s version of traditional Parsi culture probably didn’t win it any friends among older Parsis. In one of the book’s many flashbacks, soon after Sera marries, she and her new husband move in with his parents, and what follows is a classic mother-in-law nightmare. Banu Dubash, the mother-in-law, insists on traditional Parsi practices, specifically those built around the idea that a woman is impure when he has her periods. Reluctantly, Sera accepts that she must eat meals in her room until her periods are over. Although she is Parsi herself, she has no idea of the extent of her assumed impurity, and walks through the room where Banu is praying, provoking a deafening shriek and a torrent of abuse. Freddy, Sera’s kindly father-in-law, comes running in from the dining room. This is on page 76:

‘Oh, Freddy, thank God you are here,’ Banu said dramatically. ‘help me, darling, help me.’
Freddy looked distraught. ‘Banu, what is it, will you speak? Is it your heart?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Just that this whole house will have to be purified now. Sera walked across the room while I was praying and she is having her monthly cycle, you see. Still, without any consideration, she interfered with my prayers.’
Sera blushed. Before she could speak, Freddy raised his voice. ‘You and your superstitious vhems and dhakharas. Crazy woman, you are. Harassing this poor child, scaring her for no good reason.’ He grew even more angry. ‘And worst of all, you’ve ruined my enjoyment of my music. A new Mozart record I’d just bought, and now your hysterical faras has made me miss the best part.’ He flung a sympathetic look at Sera and then stomped out of the room.
Banu narrowed her eyes and flashed Sera a look that made her heart stop. ‘See what you’ve done, getting my Freddy all upset?’ she said, careful to lower her voice so that it didn’t carry into the next room. ‘Is that why you entered my house, to create friction between my husband and me?’
Sera felt dizzy, as if she had drunk four beers one after the other. She took a step toward Banu and reached out to touch her hand. ‘Banu mamma, I don’t know what happened–’
‘She touched me,’ Banu screamed. ‘Deliberately, on purpose, she touched me with her impure hands. ‘Oh, God, what kind of daakan has entered my house, to make me miserable in my old age?’
This time, Gulab, the Dubashes’ servant, came into the living room. She took one look at the situation and pushed Sera toward her bedroom. ‘Baby, you go in your room for a while,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Go on, I will calm Mummy down.’

I love the way the non-English words are given without italics or explanation. I couldn’t find ‘vhem’, ‘dhakara’ or ‘faras’ with a quick web search, and I’m happy to have them be untranslatable – or rather to be left to make my own rough translations: ‘panics’, ‘idiocies’ and ‘ruckus’, perhaps? And I love the way that each of the four people in this scene are in a different relationship to traditional religious practice. The pragmatic Gulab is probably, like Bhima, Hindu. Freddy is European in his musical tastes. Sera is part of the modern world and completely unprepared for Banu’s fanatical attachment to – in her understanding – antiquated practices. But mostly what I love is the vividly realised drama of the moment, the brilliant use of dialogue.

I came across these books thanks to the Emerging Artist’s practice of plucking books with non-Anglo author names from the shelves of our local library. It’s a life-enriching practice

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Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These

Posted on 27 October 2023 | 6 comments

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber 2021)

I first became aware of Claire Keegan through The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), an Irish-language film based on her short story ‘Foster’. I saw the film at the 2022 Sydney Film Festival, and was blown away by its portrayal of a small girl’s escape from a terrible situation. The final moment, which I won’t describe because of spoilerphobia except to say that a single, ambiguous word is spoken, is one of the most powerfully moving I’ve seen. The acting (especially Catherine Clinch as the girl), the cinematography (Kate McCullough), the direction (Colm Bairéad) and the script (by Colm Bairéad, closely following Claire Keegan’s prose) are all brilliant. I still haven’t read ‘Foster’ but I was delighted to be given Small Things Like These on Father’s Day.

It’s a tiny book – just 117 pages. It’s set in a small Irish village. Its action takes place over a few days in late December in the time not so long ago when the Catholic Church dominated the lives of most Irish people. Bill Furlong, the coal and timber merchant, is being run off his feet in the pre-Christmas rush. The son of an unmarried woman, he and his mother were able to thrive in spite of the stigma thanks to the patronage of a wealthy Protestant woman – a situation that has uncanny echoes in the Thrity Umrigar books The Space Between Us (which I’m currently reading) and The Secrets Between Us (my blog post here). He is devoted to his wife and five daughters.

A shadow is cast over this benign scene by two pages that precede the beginning of the text proper. First there is the dedication: ‘to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries’. Then, on a page to itself, there is an excerpt from The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 1916, which declares that the republic resolves, among other things, to cherish ‘all of the children of the nation equally’. Having a rough knowledge of the Magdalen laundries (Wikipedia entry here if you need to look it up), I was prepared for a little book of horrors.

Claire Keegan is a finer writer than that. There is horror, but not the jump-scare, demon-rising-from-the-grave kind, or even the Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life kind. Just outside the village there’s a ‘training school’ for girls of low character and an associated laundry, which ‘had a good reputation’. When Bill delivers a load of coal there on Christmas Eve, he comes upon a young woman who is obviously being abused, and he isn’t reassured by the nuns’ attempts to, well, gaslight him. It’s a small village, and the whispers say that no one can challenge the Church. Aware that his own mother could have found herself in the young woman’s situation, Bill faces a dilemma.

So the book hinges on a small chance encounter, a small crisis of conscience for an ordinary man, who many would say is leading a small life. The title can be read as the beginning of a sentence: Small things like these … pose big moral challenges / … can change the way you see the world / … can disrupt oppressive institutions / …

This blog generally looks at page 76. I might have preferred to talk about the page when Bill sits down to a cup of tea with the Mother Superior, or one of the pages where the abused girl talks to him. But page 76, it turns out, illustrates beautifully the way Claire Keegan tells her story.

It occurs at about the three-quarter point. We have been told very little of what’s happening in Bill’s mind. He doesn’t talk about what he has seen. Perhaps he can’t – he’s a working class Irishman of his era. But his wife, Eileen, can tell he’s ‘out of sorts’. The family go to Mass on Christmas morning. Bill stays back near the door when Eileen and their daughters walk down the aisle and slide into a pew, ‘as they’d been taught’. We’re not told if Bill usually stays by the door, or if this is a sign of new alienation. What follows could easily be a simple description of Irish villagers arriving for Mass in a past era (not all that dissimilar to Mass in the North Queensland town where I was a child in the 1950s):

Some women with headscarves were saying the rosary under their breath, their thumbs worrying through the beads. Members of big farming families and business people passed by in wool and tweed, wafts of soap and perfume, striding up to the front and letting down the hinges of the kneelers. Older men slipped in, taking their caps off and making the sign of the cross, deftly, with a finger. A young, freshly married man walked red-faced to sit with his new wife in the middle of the chapel. Gossipers stayed down on the edge of the aisle to get a good gawk, watching for a new jacket or haircut, a limp, anything out of the ordinary. When Doherty the vet passed by with his arm in a sling, there was some elbowing and whispers then more when the postmistress who’d had the triplets passed by wearing a green, velvet hat. Small children were given keys to play with, to amuse themselves, and soothers. A baby was taken out, sobbing in heaves, struggling to get loose from his mother’s hold.

This may feel like an exercise in nostalgia. But it’s not like, for example, the moment in Robert Dessaix’s Arabesques where he ‘realises’ that the lives of simple Portuguese women at Mass ‘had been redeemed, not by understanding, not by seeing Truth face to Face, but by being gathered up into the Church’ (my blog post here). Neither Bill Furlong not Claire Keegan, observing this gathering, projects visions of redemption onto it. This is an insider’s view. We are told people’s names. We can guess why the freshly-married man is red-faced, we recognise that different people make the sign of the cross differently (I love ‘deftly, with a finger’), there are class differences, children and babies need to be dealt with. It’s a picture of a community coming together that anyone of a certain age with an Irish-influenced Catholic childhood will recognise.

But it’s a critical insider’s view. Bill has a fresh distance because of his moral dilemma, Claire and the reader have perspective created by the seismic shifts in Irish culture since the time of the novel. This is a picture of a surveillance state, benign enough you’d think, but any small divergence from the normal – a sling, a new hat – is noted. It’s characteristic of Keegan’s writing that none of the divergences noted by the gossipers has any moral weight attached to it – we’re left to imagine for ourselves how that would go. We haven’t been told in so many words (this isn’t a Hollywood movie, after all) that Bill is mulling over what to do or not do, but as he looks over this scene, we feel with him the coercive pressure to conform, to accept the authority of the Church, not to rock the boat. The baby, ‘sobbing in heaves’, has to be removed – his mother’s hold is unescapable. Small things like these accumulate so that we understand the pressure Bill faces.

The whole book is a marvel.

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Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees at the Book Group

Posted on 19 October 2023 | 3 comments

Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees (2018, translation by Boris Dralyuk, MacLehose Press 2020, 2022)

Before the meeting: I hadn’t heard of Andrey Kurkov before this book was nominated for the Book Group. He’s a Ukrainian novelist, children’s writer, essayist and broadcaster. In an interview on PBS early last year he said that, though he is ethnically Russian and writes in the Russian language, Putin’s invasion has made him ashamed to be Russian, and he is now considering writing only in Ukrainian. He finds it impossible to write fiction in the current situation, but he continues to write and broadcast about the war – his series of broadcasts for the BBC, ‘Letter from Ukraine’, is available online.

Grey Bees, originally written in Russian, was first published in 2018. Russia had annexed Crimea, and there was armed conflict with Russian separatists in two breakaway ‘people’s republics’ in the Donbas region in the eastern part of Ukraine. The novel is set in a time when the front between those forces stretched for about 450 kilometres (it’s now closer to three thousand). The area between the fronts is known as the ‘grey zone’. In his useful Preface to the 2020 English edition, the author explains:

Most of the inhabitants of the villages and towns in the grey zone left at the very start of the conflict, abandoning their flats and houses, their orchards and farms. Some fled to Russia, others moved to the peaceful part of Ukraine, and others still joined the separatists. But here and there, a few stubborn residents refused to budge. … No one knows exactly how many people remain in the grey zone, inside the war. Their only visitors are Ukrainian soldiers and militant separatists, who enter either in search of the enemy, or simply out of curiosity – to check whether anyone’s still alive. And the locals, whose chief aim is to survive, treat both sides with the highest degree of diplomacy and humble bonhomie.

(Page 12–13)

Sergey Sergeyich, the hero of Grey Bees, lives in a tiny village in the grey zone, one of two cantankerous old men who have refused to leave. The electricity has been cut off. He has to trek to the next village to buy food. He depends on a charity’s annual delivery of coal for heating through the savage winter. He is a beekeeper, whose emotional life focuses on the wellbeing of the beehives that spend the winter in his garden shed. His wife and daughter are long gone, and he has never really got along with Pashka, the other remainer.

The opening scenes reminded me of Czech comedies in the 1960s like The Firemen’s Ball. There, people’s lives were miserable under the Soviet regime and the comedy was subversive as well as desperately funny. Here the enemy is the war itself, and the quiet desperation of the characters is made tolerable to the reader by their comic focus on tiny issues – like the way the two men hide from each other whatever good food they’ve managed to get hold of (where good food can include a block of lard!), or Sergey’s decision to swap the street signs so he no longer lives in Lenin Street. There’s a touch of Waiting for Godot: how can anything happen so long as they are trapped in this place?

Then, as the days warm up and the buzzing of his bees becomes more demanding, Sergey decides to take them to a place that hasn’t been laid waste by the war, and we follow him on a journey south, to environments that are more friendly to him as well as his bees. He meets with kindness, and is kind in return. He sets out to visit a Tatar beekeeper he met at a conference years before, and arrives in a tiny village in Crimea that is occupied by the Russians. In the process of getting there he has to pass through Russian checkpoints, and he is looked at with suspicion on all sides: coming from Donbas, is he a separatist or a loyal Ukrainian? He’s attacked on suspicion of being one and harassed when he is assumed to be the other. An Orthodox man, he falls foul of the Russian authorities when he befriends a Muslim family.

Though terrible things happen, what shines through is Sergey’s unassuming human kindness. The background buzzing of the bees is warmly reassuring: they go about their work, and can be counted on to produce honey, which is universally welcomed.

Towards the end, when the Russian authorities meddle with one of the hives, Sergey has dreams that the bees of that hive have turned monstrously grey, and the allegorical role of the bees, which is a quiet undercurrent for most of the book, comes front and centre in some splendidly surrealistic passages.

To give you a taste of the writing, here’s a little from page 76, when Sergey is still in the village. Spring is on the way:

The sun had spread even more of its yellowness through the yard. The trampled snow had turned yellow, as had the fence, and the grey walls of the shed and the garage.
It wasn’t that Sergeyich didn’t like it – on the contrary. But he felt that the sun’s unexpected playfulness, as appealing as it may be, disrupted the usual order of things. And so, in his thoughts, he reproached the celestial object, as if it could, like a person, acknowledge that it had acted improperly.
The artillery was whooping somewhere far, far away. Sergeyich could only hear it if he wished to hear it. And as soon as he went back to his thoughts, turning into Michurin Lane, its whooping melted away, blending into the silence.

In his preface to the 2020 edition, Andrey Kurkov says that on his visits to the grey zone he ‘witnessed the population’s fear of war and possibly death gradually transform into apathy’. Sergey’s dislike of disruption, even by warmth and playfulness, and the way he can be deaf to the whoops of the artillery, are ways of showing that apathy. It’s a terrific achievement of this book that it brings tremendous energy and compassion to bear on the person lost in apathy, and never loses sight of his enduring humanity.

After the meeting: It turned out this was an excellent choice for the group – someone awarded the Chooser two gold koalas, which must come from a children’s show I’ve missed out on.

Conversation looped around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to other terrible events of recent days in the local and international scenes, sometimes becoming heated, but not acrimonious, and kept coming back to the book. I think it was Kurkov’s insistence on keeping close to the humanity of his characters, especially Sergey, focusing on what could be benign between people, even while not mitigating the horrors of the war. The father of one group member was Ukrainian, but always identified as Russian. He himself has never learned either language but he could speak a little of how the book stirred memories of his father. The rest of us lacked such a direct connection, but I think the general feel was that we came away from the book with a much more solid grasp of the depth and reach of the current war, and the centuries of Ukraine–Russia relations that preceded it.

I got blank stares when I mentioned The Firemen’s Ball.

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Journal Catch-up 21

Posted on 12 October 2023 | 1 comment

Just two Heats in this catch-up.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 9 (Giramondo 2023)

There are five items in this Heat, and I loved three of them. (The other two are pretty good as well.)

Bonny Cassidy’s ‘Memory Book’ is a poignant memoir of dealing with the shifting sands of her father’s dementia. ‘No one is responding in the way I thought they would.’

Ender Başkan has three poems whose energy and flow make me want to hear him perform them: ‘funk n wagnalls, collect the set’ is, among other things, a comic reflection on an immigrant family’s valuing of education; in ‘family holiday’ the poem’s speaker travels on the Spirit of Tasmania with small children; ‘erotics of bookselling’ is a fabulously unerotic string of phrases from the day of a bookshop employee.

The stand-out item is the late Antigone Kefala’s ‘Last Journals’, the third instalment in her series of journals. The first two were full-length books – Sydney Journals (2008) and Late Journals (2022, my blog post here). Unlike the entries in Late Journals, the entries here are dated, from 5 January to 19 September 2022. Antigone Kefala received the Patrick White Literary Award earlier in that September – ‘Everything comes in its own time,’ she writes, ‘but not in yours.’ She died on 3 December, less that 11 weeks after the final entry, which ends, ‘Drifting … Not an an ounce of focused energy …’

My blog custom is to single out page 76 for a closer reading. As happens surprisingly often, page 76 of this Heat is a useful lens through which to see the whole of Antigone Kefala’s piece. The page has three entries – for 3, 11 and 17 April – and they reflect a mind actively engaged with the world even while burdened with a sense that the end is near. There are acerbic comments on politics (‘Everyone knocking out Morrison … his own people, a pity they did not do it before’) and the weather (‘It will take some time to dry out, but the rain will start again soon’). She celebrates the publication of Late Journals, is visited by her publishers, and anxiously hopes for a mention in the press. She starts casting about for a new project (‘Looking about for a book to start translating something – this should give me a direction’). She mentions talking to a friend on the phone, ‘using the mobile so we could see our faces’, and comments, ‘These terrible transformations … who wants to see one’s face when talking on the phone …’

What emerges is a picture of a writer, committed to her work, immersed in a community, who faces the difficulties of ageing and the approach of death, not with calm or resignation but with something more like weary annoyance. Her entry for Monday 11 April ends:

Living is problematic, but dying is problematic too.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 10 (Giramondo 2023)

This issue kicks off with ‘Life’s Work’ by Isabella Trimboli, a terrific, multi-faceted article on journals that ranges from her own practice to a five-hour cut of a movie diary. She’s specifically interested in ‘diaries from women who were not writers by vocation, that had never known true recognition, that wrote about themselves obsessively and with self-scrutiny’.

I confess that the rest of the journal didn’t sing to me.

One piece begins:

Simón entered my room and gave me a look.
Unconsciously, and then consciously, I pressed my body into a pose, breasts forward, ass to one side, and lifted the sheet, an invitation that suggested this was how I always lay before 10 a.m., like a steamed clam.

(Ellena Savage, ‘Bare Life’)

What follows isn’t terrible, but sexual intrigue in a shared house with a smattering of philosophy about Covid shutdowns isn’t my cup of tea. And I know it’s a lost cause, but that ‘ass’ – along with a ‘diaper’ elsewhere in the journal – gets my back up. It’s an Australian literary journal, do we have to use US language?

Another:

Someone did give birth to me. Why remains unclear. Maybe they wanted to be loved, or it just sort of happened.

(Harold Voetmann, ‘Common Room Rocking Horse’, translated by Johanne Sorgenti Ottosen)

Sorry, but I find that hard to take seriously, and it’s not funny.

Then there’s this:

The house had bricks the colour of runny shit and a linoleum floor that was so thin you could scrape a hole in it by pushing back your chair.

(Kat Capel, ‘Sightseeing’)

As you might almost guess, this turns out to be a story of unconventional sexual compulsions set mainly in a share house. I’m too old.

And then this:

This looking at myself, touching myself, it all started a long time ago. In nursery school, in fact, when I was five or six years old.

(Lin Bai, ‘The Light in the Mirror’, translated by Nicky Harman)

That’s the inauspicious opening of what turns out to be an extract from Lin Bai’s 1994 novel, A War of One’s Own, which, according the brief author bio (on page 76), ‘was an instant success and established her as a pioneer of women’s literature in China’. The Wikipedia entry on the novel doesn’t mention translation, so this may be the first time this writing has been translated into English. If so, hats off to Heat and Nicky Harman. But, quite apart from my distaste for extracts from longer works, I won’t pretend to have enjoyed it.

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Yumna Cassab’s Australiana

Posted on 15 September 2023 | 2 comments

Yumna Cassab, Australiana: A Novel (Ultimo Press 2022)

I came to this book with inappropriate expectations. I had just read Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story and Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia, and the title Australiana seemed to suggest a similar attempt to speak to the state of Australian culture – possibly, given the author’s name, from a non-Anglo perspective. If those other books hadn’t been in my mind I might have expected an ironic treatment of clichés of national identity, like kangaroos, slouch hats, or Big Things.

But neither of those expectations was met. As far as I can tell there is no attempt at a grand unifying statement about Australia, and there’s no cute wildlife or cultural kitsch. Nor is the book a novel, as proclaimed in small print on the cover (but not on the title page, which makes one suspect that it was the cover designer who added the descriptor). It’s a number of short fictions.

There are five stories, all more or less presenting grim sketches of life in rural New South Wales, up Tamworth way. The first and longest, ‘The Town’, is the most interesting. It consists of roughly 30 short pieces – ranging from half a dozen lines to seven pages in length. Most pieces pick up a detail of the previous one – a character, an action, a piece of furniture – and place it in a different story, as if the writer’s attention is caught by a detail in one story and lets it lead her (and us) where it will. What emerges is not so much a mosaic of country town life as a meander through parts of it: there’s flood, fire, and drought, so maybe a hint of a grand national panorama in the background.

In the first piece, an unnamed character has his house broken into a number of times, and on the fourth time he has a weirdly amicable chat with the intruders. Subsequent pieces introduce us to the intruders, and then to other people in their lives. The pattern repeats: asomething happens, then we see it from another perspective, and what had seemed arbitrary, weird or perhaps insane, becomes comprehensible – or vice versa. The writing is spare, and trusts the reader to make the connections – even sometimes to make them up.

If you picked the book up in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop and turned to page 76 to check it out, you would be in the midst of the section ‘The Knife and the Axe’, featuring a man consumed with anxiety when his nine-year-old daughter invites a friend home from school. The friend, we know from the previous story, has set fire to his father’s fields in reaction to something his father did that enraged him:

Would you believe it? No, he did not believe it. His own daughter was nine years old and he tried to imagine her burning their home or even the fence and he couldn’t. She would never do it. She had pigtails and ribbons and went around in a dress and polished shoes. His little Mia would never do that.

He truly believed that until she brought Jayden around after school. She told her dad that Jayden was in her class and he was afraid to go home, could he stay a while, please.

That’s all we hear about the aftermath of the boy’s arson in his own home. This story stays resolutely with the point of view of the girl’s father, and becomes a tale of parental paranoia:

He hid the matches and the lighter before they entered the house and he worried about the fireplace giving Jayden ideas. So he seated then at the dining table with their backs to where the fire could have been.

Not to spoil the episode for you, but his anxiety cranks up when the children go to Mia’s bedroom and Mia asks for a candle. ‘The Knife and the Axe’ ends with a classic horror-movie cliffhanger (I should mention that the fragments in this and the other stories move in and out of a range of genres, including fairy tale and prose poem and micro fiction), as the children, armed with a knife and an axe, come towards him demanding that he give them candles:

He turned and ran for the door but he didn’t make it that far. As he fell to the ground he thought: I never imagined my life would end like this.

(Page 79)

And the next section, ‘Lost’, picks up the story from his wife’s point of view. I won’t disclose why he failed to reach the door beyond saying that the story isn’t lacking in sardonic humour.

As befits such a set of linked episodes, the final one returns to an object that was stolen in the first.

Each of the other four stories is similarly made up of short, sometimes very short sections. Three of them are grim contemporary tales, and the fourth, ‘Captain Thunderbolt’, is a mix of narrative, verse, and reflective essays inspired by the lingering presence of the titular bushranger in the New Englandregion.

I still don’t understand the book’s title. I suppose ‘Tamworthiana’ or ‘New Englandiana’ don’t have much of a ring to them.

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Winter reads 9: Richard James Allen’s Text Messages from the Universe

Posted on 24 August 2023 | Leave a comment

This is my ninth and last post on books I took with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. I’ve been home for a while, but it takes a while for the blog to catch up with life.

Richard James Allen, Text Messages from the Universe (Flying Island Books 2023)

Like the other titles in Flying Island’s ‘minor works / Pocket Poets’ series, Text Messages from the Universe is a physically tiny book – just 152 x 102 mm. But it’s part of a broader multi-media project.

There’s a movie of the same name directed by Richard James Allen, which is the source of the lavish images of dancing figures that accompany the text (or perhaps, depending on how you see things, that are accompanied by the text). The front cover is from a painting created for the book by 2023 Archibald finalist Michelle Hiscock. The text itself, a single prose poem, is the final work in the multi-volume The Way Out At Last Cycle, which has been three decades in the making (Hale & Ironmonger published The Way Out At Last and other poems in 1985).

The poem is inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The first, shorter section is addressed to a person who dies in a car accident. In the second section, made up of 49 short parts, the person is lost in a state between death and rebirth, the bardo, in a cycle of dreaming and waking, bewildered, disoriented and panicking. The poetry takes on a weirdly insubstantial quality that is beautifully enhanced by the billowing drapery of the dancers on every page. I haven’t read the Tibetan Book of the Dead – that part of 1960s enthusiasm passed me by – so I don’t know if the poem follows it with any precision, but there’s a wonderful sense of being carried along on a current leading to detached oblivion and then, perhaps, to a new beginning.

No spoiler intended, but the text messages of the title are revealed towards the end of the poem, in part 46: ‘This is your last moment,’ closely followed by, ‘This is your first moment.’ Part 47 adds this gloss:

As for the rest, Your text messages from the universe 
seem to be happy to take any form and any language 
they please.

Some of them aren't even text messages, just 
whispers inside your head.

Speaking as someone who is currently reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, I’d add they may also come in the form of a child chanting on the other side of a wall.

Even while I’m enjoying the poem’s journey in an invented universe (apologies to any of my readers for whom the bardo is as real as purgatory is to some Catholics), my tendency as a reader is to cast around for the kind of actual experience that the invention draws on and possibly illuminates. The short poem on page 76, section 36, rewards this tendency:

(36)
A ragged poster floats by in 
the gutter. The people inside 
are the beautiful people.
They are living the there life.
They have made it.

Whereas, you feel like 
you are never really there.
Even when you are there.

Incidentally, this is the only image in the book where the dancer is less than elegant, where the fabric is not floating in an ethereal breeze. It signals that, as so often happens, page 76 is a kind of turning point, in this case a low point.

The text offers one of the poem’s many noir-ish images – one of many alleys, gutters and empty lots. The poster is a piece of detritus from the life left behind. In the dream world of the poem, it asserts the substantiality of that life, its thereness. These lines reward my penchant for literalness by drawing on a moment of a kind I imagine we’ve all had: you see a poster for some event and reflect fleetingly that the life represented in the poster is unreal – either that, or it’s part of a reality that you have no part of. This is the moment in the bardo when the newly-dead person is closest to nothingness: it’s the rubbish poster that’s real.

In the years that this poem was fermenting, the bardo attracted the attention of a number of other creators. I’m aware of George Saunders’s multivocal novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which I haven’t read, and Laurie Anderson’s movie Heart of a Dog (2015), for which I just couldn’t stay awake. I had no trouble staying awake on the journey with Text Messages from the Universe.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Text Messages from the Universe.

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Winter reads 8: Sophia Wilson’s Sea Skins

Posted on 14 August 2023 | Leave a comment

This is my eight post on books I took with me on my brief escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. (I’ve actually been home for a while, but the blog is still catching up.)

Sophia Wilson, Sea Skins (Flying Island Books 2023)

Sophia Wilson was joint winner of the inaugural Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets in 2022. Originally from Australia, she now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The poems in this collection reflect her attachment to both countries: there are poems based in her Australian childhood, and a number about the fraught history of colonisation in Aotearoa, as well as evocations of its land. There are also poems that bear witness to her experience as health professional (one poem mentions ‘the unbearable silence of asystole’), translator (most notably in ‘En Cas d’Urgence’, which switches among English, German, French, Spanish, Greek and Chinese), and manager of a wildlife refuge. That is to say they deal with an astonishing range of subjects.

If I had to generalise, I’d say the book’s central concern is the assertion of the human as part of nature as opposed to abstraction and mechanisation. But as soon as I’d written that sentence I read four short poems that only fit this description with quite a bit of mental contortion.

As with a lot of contemporary poetry, a key feature is a compression of meaning, which means that precise meaning is often elusive.

The poem on page 76 comes with a dedication: ‘for Valeria’. It’s an elegy for a friend who has died:

Nello Specchio d'Acqua
You were a glass blower, un soffiatore di vetro 
hands of silica and carmine
You lifted a globe, il tuo capolavoro
Within it two dancers cast crumbs to pigeons
A window opened to the sea

You were the blind man crossing a piazza
I was your white-tipped cane
On the bridge, at the centre, above the grey 
you were the singer, the song

I was the street sweeper, gathering dust
You were a magician, un pagliaccio intossicato 
dancing across the square

I was the guide in a maddened crowd
You were a tramp passing by - 
a mirage in a watery mirror
adrift on swelling tides

You were wasted, skeletal -
maligno il cancro, il tuo fiore in gola
You were sinking foundations, eroded façade
a stone lion slipped beneath tidelines

The sea swallowed our steps - 
you were swallowed in steps
invaded through doors, the walls of your neck 
your mouth's floor – la tua lingua

They gave you a tube for a windpipe

I measure the loss of you in tides
You were scattered at the rate of tsunami

There was a glass blower, un sofiatore di vetro 
who lifted a globe, il suo capolavoro 
I was a street sweeper, treading water

You came dancing across the square

(for Valeria)

This is a lovely evocation of a lost friend, with references to their experiences together that are cryptic, but not so cryptic as to be frustrating. The friend was clearly Italian, a glass blower, who died of cancer of the throat. The scattering of Italian phrases is a way of honouring the friend’s cultural heritage. (A number of poems in the collection do this with Mãori words, wth a similar effect of honouring difference.)

A specchio d’acqua is usually translated as a calm expanse of water. As specchio means ‘mirror’, the emphasis is on the surface reflection rather than other watery qualities – so the phrase could also be translated as ‘watery mirror’ (as in stanza four). Most of the other Italian phrases are pretty much explained in the text: capolavoro is ‘masterpiece’; un pagliaccio intossicato is ‘a drunken clown’.

The first stanza introduces the friend as an artist, and focuses on a glass globe created by her, a glass globe containing two dancing figures.

The next three stanzas riff on that image, describing the poet’s relationship to the artist in terms of two figures in a setting that suggests Venice: the big square, a group of tourists, a bridge, water. The poet was mundane, ‘gathering dust’; the friend magical, a drunken clown, a mirage, a singer, an exotic beggar. It’s not all one-way – the ‘I’ is a white-tipped cane for the friend as blind man, perhaps implying that she brought some groundedness.

Then the poem turns abruptly to the friend’s final days, wasted and skeletal. Interestingly the key information is left untranslated: maligno il cancro, il tuo fiore in gola, ‘malignant the cancer, your flower in the throat’. It’s as if the poet can’t bear to say the words in her own language. In what follows, the images of Venice are no longer of romantic waterways, bridges and tourist-filled squares, but ‘sinking foundations, eroded façade’ and the threat of rising sea levels. The cancer invades the friend’s body like floodwaters, in steps at first – and then, in the third-last stanza, leaving all thought of Venice behind, with the overwhelming force of a tsunami.

The single-line stanza, ‘They gave you a tube for a windpipe,’ interrupts the metaphorical elaboration with a moment of brutal literalness. There’s no need to name death itself: this tube says it all.

The last two stanzas turn again. The first of them reprises the poem’s opening movement, condensing it into three lines, but now the friend is no longer addressed directly. She can only be spoke of in the third person – ‘There was a glass blower’. The poet now recalls herself, not as gathering bust but as treading water ,an alrernative way of saying the same thing, that paves the way beautifully for the final line.

And the final twist: the friend can be spoken to again – and the vital image of her as she first appeared reasserts itself: ‘You came dancing across the square.’

I so get this! A friend of mine died recently. There was a wonderful farewell gathering where her many achievements were celebrated, and her qualities as a friend eloquently evoked. I can’t think of her without a terrible sense of loss, but at the same time my mind keeps returning to an occasion when, a fifty-something woman exultant at having won a game of canasta, she leapt onto the card table to do a wild, stomping victory dance.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Sea Skins.

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Winter reads 5: Nicholson Baker’s Anthologist, page 76

Posted on 4 August 2023 | 4 comments

This is my fifth post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. Most of the books have been physically tiny books of poetry. This is the second novel.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster 2009)

One of the men from my Book Group handed a copy of The Anthologist to me with a knowing look. ‘You’ll love this,’ he said.

He was right.

Paul Chowder is a minor US poet. He has had poems in The New Yorker and is on nodding terms with eminent literary figures. When the book opens he’s running spectacularly late with his introduction to an anthology he has edited, of rhyming poetry. His girlfriend, Roz, has found his procrastination unbearable and moved out. Over the next couple of weeks and almost 250 pages, he ruminates on what he wants to say in the introduction, does a half-hearted clean-up of his house and workspace, makes feeble attempts to win Roz back, and reflects on his own failings as a poet and a human being.

That’s it. It’s not exactly nail-biting stuff. I loved it.

The guts of the book is Chowder’s mind playing over the things he wants to say in the introduction. He has theories about metre that fly in the face of standard accounts, but are far from ridiculous. He spells them out in detail, with many examples. He considers the last century or so of ‘free verse’ to have been a mistake, though he admits some excellent poems have been written without rhyme. He detests enjambment. He dishes the goss about great poets of the past, and has plenty to say about key poets – especially Swinburne (too much of a good thing), Marinetti (bad), Elizabeth Bishop (good), Ezra Pound (very bad). He takes several pages to rip into Pound – the man himself and those who protect his legacy. His opening salvo gives you the general gist:

Pound … was by nature a blustering bigot – a humourless jokester – a talentless pasticheur – a confidence man.

(Page 92)

This may make it sound like a series of lit-crit essays strung together on a flimsy narrative. But that’s not so at all. It really feels that we are spending time inside the hand of a man almost totally preoccupied with matters poetical. If we learn something, that’s a side benefit. If we disagree with him, all the better. You may have to be interested in poetry to be interested in Paul Chowder: there’s no exuberant sex as in Alejandro’s Zambra’s The Chilean Poet, another excellent novel about poetry. The stakes are pretty low – will he get back with Roz, will he ever write his introduction, will he ever write a poem he thinks is any good? But I for one enjoyed it from cover to cover.

Spending a little time on page 76, I realise that we learn a lot more about Paul than I have indicated so far. The page begins with memories of his father, who used to recite two poems ‘with his fists clenched’ – ‘John Masefield’s “Cargoes” and E. E. Cummings’s poem about the watersmooth silver stallion. I had to look the latter poem up (it’s here if you’re interested): Paul Chowder’s father was more sophisticated than my parents, who sang ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and recited part of ‘The Hound of Heaven’ respectively; my older brother used to recite E. E. Cummings’s poem with ‘mudluscious’ in it.

He says in passing that he misses his parents every day – a note that is struck a number of times without further elaboration. Then his mind moves on, first to Tennyson:

Tennyson’s father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems.

Characteristically, having made a huge value judgement, he pulls back from it:

Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I’m not sure.

None of this may make it into the Introduction, but a constant process of drafting and redrafting is under way.

But his mind won’t stay there for long:

Last night I watched two episodes of Dirty Jobs and then went upstairs to bed after thinking that my poetry was not for shit, frankly. If I may be pardoned the expression. I got in bed, and I realised that what I wanted was to have some Mary Oliver next to me. If I had some Mary Oliver I would be saved

Now, the second most visited post on my blog is about a book by Mary Oliver, so whether by calculation or otherwise, Paul’s wanting her book next to him will strike a chord with many readers (it does with me). She was alive when the book was written, and I hope she would have been chuffed that he turned to her for salvation, even though she doesn’t use rhyme or strict metre.

If you picked up The Anthologist in a bookshop and flipped to page 76, you’d get a fair idea of what the book is: a kind of stream of consciousness of a man who is steeped in poetry and feels himself to be part of a great community of poets living and dead – a poet himself, a passionate reader, a teacher of sorts, a mind that’s alive.

I hear that Nicholson Baker has written a second book about Paul Chowder. I can’t imagine it.

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