Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025: My day one, part two

Posted on 23 May 2025 | 4 comments

While I went home after two sessions on Thursday and wrote my first post about the Festival, the Emerging Artist stayed on at Carriageworks for Anne Summers: 50 Years of Damned Whores and God’s Police.

We debriefed over dinner, then were back into the fray for:

22 May 8 pm: Ittay Flescher: The Holy and the Broken

Michael Visontay sat alone on the stage and interviewed a huge image of Ittay Flescher on a screen behind him.

Ittay Flescher is the Education Director at Kids4Peace Jerusalem, described on the Festival website as an interfaith movement that ‘works to build trust and friendship between Israeli and Palestinian teens’. His response to Visontay’s opening question said a lot about his work. The question included the word ‘conflict’. He said that like many words, that one is itself ‘conflicted’: some hear it as implying two more or less equal sides and so denying the reality of genocide. He listed a number of terms that have radically different meanings depending on your point of view: Holocaust, naqba, Zionism, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Palestinian.

Serendipitously, today (Friday) I saw a T-shirt bearing a poem by Sakr Omar that speaks directly to his point from a Palestinian point of view, it’s one of a series of shirts produced by Readers and Writers against Genocide:

Back to Ittay Flescher. ‘I’m not a politician,’ he said. ‘I wrote the book as an educator.’ And he spent his brief hour educating us. Both Jews and Palestinians have a deep sense of having been oppressed, both with good reason. He sees it as absolutely necessary that the ancient terrors and hatreds born of those brutal histories not to be passed on to the next generation. His work is all about countering the dehumanisation of the Other, and helping people to learn to have open-hearted conversations among people from opposite sides of great divides. He asks: ‘What happened in your life to lead you to believe what you believe, to hold the positions you hold?’ Then he shares his own beliefs and the experience that underlie them. A conversation of this sort doesn’t aim to reach agreement but to recognise the humanity of each other.

He has been called pathetic, naive and delusional by a staunch Zionist journalist, and seen as unbelievably one-sided by some Palestinian activists. But he has many emails from people approaching him as a therapist: ‘I am torn. What should I do?’

If you look at the news, not just from Israel–Palestine but from many places in the world, an understandable response is to despair. In his view, despair leads to more violence. It’s necessary to have a sense of possibility, to have some vision for a resolution where both peoples can live in a secure, just peace. (He didn’t mention Rebecca Solnit, but I was reminded of her argument – I’m paraphrasing from memory – that you can never know what your smallest action in a good direction will lead to, there is never a reason not to have a go.) There’s actually an Egyptian peace proposal on the table that he thinks should be taken up.

That’s a crude condensation of what he had to say. Responding to questions, he made it clear that his work, and his organisation, are part of a peace-building community in Israel and Palestine that includes hundred of organisations and thousands of people.

I bought a copy of his book, The Holy and the Broken: A cry for peace from a land that must be shared. I expect I’ll be writing more about it in time.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging. Looking ahead a little, a poet from the United Arab emirates said today (Friday) that she was enjoying the rain. This is glorious, wet country.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025: My day one, part one

Posted on 22 May 2025 | 7 comments

It’s raining in Sydney, but the Writers’ Festival shines on, apostrophe intact.

This year’s theme is ‘In This Together’. The Emerging Artist and I plan to take in about 17 sessions between us, mostly in it together. Given recent attacks elsewhere on speech about the genocide in Gaza, I will be disappointed but not surprised if some of our booked sessions are cancelled, but here’s hoping. 

22 May 1.00: Beyond the Self (link to come when podcast is released)

The Festival website description of this session begins:

Anchored in our human body, our experience of being in the world extends outwards from our sense of self.

Oh well, I thought, the program descriptions don’t usually determine the conversation.

The four panellists have written very different books, and come from very different contexts. What they have in common is that they are all First Nations people. The chair was Bardi Jawi man Bebe Oliver, who first came to prominence as WA Young Australian of the Year for his work as a classical pianist and composer has had several books of poetry published. Other panellists were Bundjalung and Kullilli man Daniel Browning who has worked as a journallist and broadcaster for many years, and has recently published Close to the Subject, a collection of personal essays; Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander man Thomas Mayo, who played a huge role in the Voice referendum and whose books, especially Always Was, Always Will Be: The Campaign for Justice and Recognition Continues, reflect his activism; and Yuwaalaraay woman Nardi Simpson, originally half of the singing duo Stiff Gins, and now author of Song of the Crocodile and The Belburd.

Nardi Simpson made a valiant attempt to tie the conversation back to the idea of bodies – go out from my body to yours when I sing for you, and when I write a book, these funny little squiggles on an oblong thing can make other people tingle. But mostly the yarning (as Bebe called it a number of times) ranged freely. All four panellists had interesting things to say, and they connected with each other, but I’m at a loss to summarise.

One theme that emerged for me was to do with aurality. Paradoxically, Daniel Browning said that for years he had sat in climate-controlled studios in the ABC talking to a microphone with little or no sense (and I may have added the ‘little or’ there) that there was anyone listening, whereas when he wrote an essay, he had an immediate sense that he was talking to someone. Spoken words are transient; written-down words have power. Nardi Simpson reported more or less the opposite: when you sing to an audience you’re right there with each other, but who knows what happens with a book? Thomas Mayo, likewise, said that he has come to love speaking to people (he did a lot of that, brilliantly, during the Voice Referendum campaign) – looking them in the eye, and if there’s a disagreement you can see it there. Nardi Simpson made explicit the underlying notion, that First Nations people come from an oral culture, and she and Daniel Browning told moving stories about audio versions of their books reaching people who wouldn’t otherwise have read them.

What all panellists agreed was that we are living in a time in this country when First Nations stories need to be told, and there is an audience for them. ‘If I/we don’t tell the stories, someone will say it didn’t happen.’

There was a brief conversation about the experience about being misunderstood, including very different feelings about the editing process. Nardi Simpson spoke directly to one of my current concerns when she said (and this is not an exact quote): ‘The book is there. Yuwaalaraay will find this in it.Aboriginal people will find this. Allies will find this. People who nothing about me or us will find this.’

2.00: Bringing the Past to Life (link to come when podcast is released)

The incomparable Kate Evans, co-presenter of The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National, did a lovely job managing this conversation about historical fiction with Emily Maguire whose latest book, on my To Be Read Soon list, is the novel Rapture, and Jock Serong, whose urban fairytale Cherrywood sounds terrific – I have seen a narration of its plot hold a seven-year-old spellbound.

Somehow a novel based on the 9th century CE legend of Pope Joan (or is it only a legend?) and one about a hotel in Fitzroy that lifts its skirts and wanders around the city made an excellent pairing. They both, it turns out, deal with institutions that have forgotten what they are here for. The Catholic Church in Maguire’s book is so concerned with its rituals and procedures that it has lost sight of its central mission. The corporate law firm in Cherrywood is hell bent on tracking down the wandering pub, but only one old man whom everyone ignores remembers why.

It was fun.

The Festival is happening on Gadigal land, I have written this on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging. As Bebe Oliver said in acknowledging country this afternoon, Always was, always will be Blak land.

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Dombóvár, the anthology

Posted on 21 May 2025 | Leave a comment

Hunter Writers’Centre, Dombóvár: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2024 (Hunter Writers’ Centre 2024)

On its web page, the Newcastle Poetry Prize describes itself as the most prestigious poetry competition in Australia. Few people would disagree.

The Hunter Writers’ Centre has coordinated the prize since 2002, and it publishes an anthology every year that includes the prize winning poem, the runners up, a number of subsidiary prize winners and a selection of other submissions.

As the 2024 judges Caitlin Maling and Peter Boyle, each with their own impressive list of prizes, point out, a distinctive feature of the prize is that poems up to 200 lines are accepted. And most of the poems in this anthology are of substantial length – the shortest is 27 lines. The anthology is a rare opportunity to read a selection of longer poems from a wide range of Australian poets.

As my regular readers know, I read quite a lot of poetry, if not enough to call myself a critic. I was happy to read poems here by people whose work I respond to:

  • Mark Tredinnick, whose ‘A Godwit Sonnet Cycle’ won the Hunter Writers’ Centre Member Award
  • B. R. Dionysius, whose three-line stanzas in ‘Fishbone Ferns’ give us scenes from life on the Darling Downs – ‘it can be quite WW1 out on the downs, bodies / hung up on barbed wire, left to rot as a sign to / others – don’t try it, don’t cross into no man’s.’
  • Brendan Ryan, with another of his wonderful cow poems, ‘The snaking accuracy of cow trails’
  • Kathryn Lomer, with ‘Hyaenia song’, a narrative poem set in Ethiopia.

And there’s the immediate reason that I bought a copy, Christopher (Kit) Kelen’s ‘Dombóvár’, which won the prize and gave its name to the anthology. I don’t envy the judges their task, but they’ve chosen well with ‘Dombóvár’, which evokes the small Hungarian town that Kit Kelen’s family come from (at least that’s how I read the poem).

I can’t do better than quote the judges (a PDF of their report is available at this link, and is worth reading in full):

‘Dombóvár’ skilfully integrates thoughtful reflection on important issues, humour, inventiveness and an engaging partly colloquial tone. This evocation of small town rural Hungary carries echoes of the moral ambiguities and violence of settler societies like Australia. Throughout the poem there is the suggestion of a larger, potentially national, narrative, but the reader is left to work through the weave themselves … With great skill the poem breaks standard idioms and expected word choices to produce a clipped, very tight effect that intensifies the reader’s experience. ‘Dombóvár’ uses the form of a poem sequence to powerful effect, shaping a masterful poem that can be read on multiple levels.

this is the land of forgive ourselves
for all we've done, will do

There’s lots more in the anthology. To be true to my page 78* practice, I’ll mention ‘The Keeper of the Field’ by Mal McKimmie (pages 74–80). It’s one of several sonnet sequences in the anthology, and a quick web search informs me that it’s far from being the only one written by Mal McKimmie.

The sequence is prefaced by a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, and I’m guessing that the ideas it explores are related to Hinduism: the field is (crudely speaking) the mind, and it is populated by sheep (ideas? poems?). The sonnets circle around the notion of an empty field – mind empty of thought, perhaps. In the two sonnets on page 78, the sequence moves forward to the notion that all fields (all minds?) are connected – we are not the isolated individuals that we think we are in the West. That might sound abstract and difficult, but the poems are remarkably lucid. Here, ripped from its context, is one of the two on page 78 to give you a taste:

Did I say this field has a fence? Well, it 
doesn't anymore. It seems the fence came 
down, was taken down, or disappeared 
with the sheep, as if they were interdependent 
(I faintly recall a lyric passing 
through here, singing something along these lines).
Given the absence of a fence, where is 
the distinction between this field and another?
Do I tend a disappearing border?

Leaves of grass, field to field, lean in sympathy, 
mirror each other; flowers too; even 
weeds copy their kin; creepers creep towards 
each other; and roots, well, roots have always known: 
nothing is alone, nothing under the sun.

if the poem is exploring ideas from Hinduism, it manages to remind us that the quintessential North American poet Walt Whitman was in similar territory – his poem ‘Song of Myself’ includes lines like ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’ And recent science about tree roots supplies the poem with a beautiful metaphor for interconnectedness.

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2025 NSW [Premier’s] Literary Awards night

Posted on 20 May 2025 | 11 comments

I almost missed the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards this year. I missed the announcement of the short lists altogether, and only realised that the awards were last night because the Sydney Writers’ Festival is about to start and I think of the NSWPLAs as the first cab off the festival rank.

Here I am making up for the omission. Sadly I’ve read only one of the books, and seen a production of only one script, none of the winners.

Last night, the awards ceremony was live streamed. As always on a Monday, I was busy being grandfather, so I tuned in late. It’s all on YouTube and you can even watch it by clicking the image below. The ceremony begins with didjeridoo and Welcome to Country by Uncle Brendan Kerin, who spoke eloquently about the meaning of the word ‘Country’ in this context. After introductory speeches from librarians and politicians, the presentation of awards by Senior Judge Bernadette Brennan and Library Chair Bob Debus begins at about 29 minutes.

Here are the shortlists in the order of announcements, with links to the judges’ comments. The winners are first in each list, in bold:

UTS Glenda Adam’s Award for New Writing ($10,000)

Dr Tracy Westerman appeared on video, speaking from Perth: ‘As someone who doesn’t consider themselves to be a real writer, as a kid from the Pilbara who had a pretty unorthodox education through distance education, being awarded for my writing feels, frankly, a little bit surreal.’ She went on to talk about mental wellbeing: it ‘should never be just for the privileged, and Jilya sheds light on the reality that it continues to be … because of a one-size-fits-all, monocultural approach to mental health.’

Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000)

Nam Le, also on video, spoke against a background of a bookshelf piled high with books. He thanked many people and dedicated the award to his father, who ‘has been an engine of multiculturalism in this country’.

Indigenous Writers’ Prize ($30,000)

Lorraine Coppin, CEO of Juluwarlu Group, also spoke on video. She and her husband have spent years documenting Yindjibarndi stories – the graphic novel format is a way of making the history accessible to young people.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)

Glenn Shea appeared in person! He is a member of the Stolen Generations. The play’s story comes from community. The question it asks is how do we plant seeds for our young people to shift and shape their decision-making about work lives and community. He shouted out La Mama theatre among many others.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)

Charles Williams was also in the room. He started out with a remark that must have struck a chord with many people in the movie industry: ‘I usually identify as a director more than as a writer, but I spend a lot of my life writing and not much directing.’ He quoted Charlie Kaufman: ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people,’ and noted in passing that Kaufman stole the line from Thomas Mann.

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)

Katrina Nannestad thanked all the right people, but in particular her mother, whose story is in the book.

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000)

Emma Lord said among other things that everything she writes is for her daughter, even though she is too young for the books. She acknowledged the courage of her publishers who accepted a book with a pandemic in it during a pandemic. Following a developing theme of the evening, she said her mother shared the award.

Translation Prize ($30,000)

Elizabeth Bryer accepted by video. She said she had decided to wind back her translation practice because she couldn’t see a way to make it viable. This award changes that, and means she can take on a project she had been thinking about – to set up a mentorship wth an emerging translator who is a person of colour or a heritage speaker.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)

Hasib Hourani described rock flight as intended to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine. ‘Throwing a rock is one kind of protest. A book is another.’

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40, 000)

James Bradley revealed that winners had been instructed to speak for less than a minute. Among the many thankyous, he thanked Ashley Hay who read every draft. With a nod to W. H. Auden, he said that though it seems like books don’t make anything happen, his experience with this book has shown that this isn’t actually the case: ‘Books change minds, and by changing minds they can change the world, and at the moment that matters more than it has ever mattered before.’

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)

Fiona McFarlane is on the road, so Alex Craig from her publishers Allen & Unwin read a speech on her behalf.

The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award ($10,000)

The Lasting Harm, Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin)

Lucia Osborne-Crowley was another video appearance. Before she made the necessary thankyous she noted the importance of writers speaking up for Palestinians who are being subjected to genocide and war crimes. She thanked the survivor community who voted for her – the book is for and about and by survivors of sexual violence and child sexual violence.

Special Award

This award went to Liminal. The award was accepted by founding editor Leah Jing McIntosh. Evidently aware than many people watching the awards or reading about them might not have herd of Liminal, she began by explaining that it is ‘a project driven by the desire to make visible the unacknowledged structures of racism that so dehumanise all of us.’ She went on, ‘We work towards new ways of thinking, of seeing, of being in the world. That is to say, we work together towards a better future. We know we cannot do it alone.’

Book of the Year ($10,000)

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Nam Le (Scribner Australia). Ben Ball from Scribner Australia read a speech written by Nam Le. He expanded on his earlier dedication to his father, and spoke interestingly and powerfully about multiculturalism. I won’t try to summarise his speech here out of respect for his intellectual property. I hope it’s published somewhere. At heart it was a warning against complacency.

The twin shadows of Gaza and Trump were never far from the stage, and repudiations of all they stood for were frequent. And what a reading list has emerged from the evening, even if only of the winners.

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Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave

Posted on 16 May 2025 | 3 comments

Claire G. Coleman, Enclave (Hachette Australia 2023)

This is the first book I’ve read by Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman. Her first novel, Terra Nullius, won prestigious prizes and her poetry and essays appear regularly in journals I read. (If you want to plough through my earlier posts to see what I’ve managed to say about those earlier encounters, here’s a link.) So I was happy when I got hold of a copy of Enclave, her third novel. I enjoy science fiction, so the fact that it’s a dystopian genre novel was an extra cause for joyful anticipation.

The book delivered on both fronts – filling the spot in my heart reserved for intelligent speculative fiction, and expanding my acquaintance with Claire G. Coleman’s writing. If you want to read a proper review, I recommend Magdalena Ball at Compulsive Reader (here’s a link), Maggie Nolan on The Conversation (link), Bill Holloway at The Australian Legend (link)or all three.I’ll stick to my resolve of focusing on page 78*. As often happens, this arbitrarily chosen page reveals a lot about the book, and hints at a lot more.

We are at about the one-quarter point of the narrative. Christine is the protagonist, a young white woman from an affluent family living in the walled city of Safetytown. Her father has bought her a new apartment as a reward for her success at university, and on this page her parents are taking her to ‘the homemaker centre’ to buy furniture, along with her younger brother, Brandon.

The building was huge. A great big windowless box, the outside grey-painted steel, as tall as their house. Christine wanted to see if she could see the Wall from the top but could see no way to get up there.
Their car roared underground. The car park was the size of the building, painted a nauseating colour, something between souring cream and pus-green, lit by fluorescent tubes, blue-white, as bright as day. Something about the colour, the cold light, cut into Christine’s brain like a hangover.
She had always hated this place.

The citizens of Safetytown are constantly being told how fortunate they are, how safe. Yet the adjectives here tell a different story: ‘windowless’, ‘grey-painted’, ‘nauseating’, souring’, ‘pus-green’. Even more significant is the ever-present Wall. It’s a powerful image, inevitably reminding us of Trump, Berlin and Israel–Palestine. Christine has always been told that beyond it is nothing but predatory violence, misery and chaos. In the otherwise sharply visual elements of this page, it is present to Christine as an object of curiosity even though it’s out of sight. She is beginning to suspect that she has been lied to: she is clear that she has always hated the homemaker centre, but a deeper discontent is brewing.

The next paragraph goes further into the reasons for her discontent:

Security’s cars could not have been more obvious if they tried. Hatchbacks, sedans and vans, all black. Their windows were tinted; on their bodies, and on their bumpers, were patches of a different texture of black – tinted glass panels hiding cameras.
Around the car park on every pillar, on seemingly arbitrary sections of roof, were conventional video cameras. The cameras were obvious and Christine wondered why she had never noticed that before.
Or had she noticed but forgotten? The thought was slippery; she could not hold on to it.

This first part of the novel is about Christine’s awakening. Here she’s noticing things she has never noticed before, in particular the ominously ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement. Not on this page, but part of the same process, she has noticed that one of the anonymous brown ‘servants’ is extraordinarily beautiful. These uniformed servants, all people of colour, are bussed in each day from beyond the wall and then out again in the evening. They ensure that the citizens don’t have to lift a finger to tend to the necessities of life. No one asks how they live on the other side, and in the early chapters they might as well be invisible, but like the women in the movie Conclave they are very present to the reader. Christine’s attraction to the woman servant is so outside the realm of what is considered possible that, like her ‘slippery’ thought about the cameras, it only fitfully enters her consciousness.

They exited the car, one of the doors slamming with a dull echoing thump; deafening, startling. Father turned to the sound, the anger on his face uncharacteristic; he normally hid it better. When he saw Brandon, staring into his face defiantly, daring him to react, Father smiled indulgently. Christine fumed in silence.

So much of what is to unfold is hinted at here. The benevolent father bestowing a brand new flat and furnishings on his daughter is suddenly enraged: not that he’s usually calm, but that he normally hides his rage. When he sees that it’s his son who has made the noise, he is pacified. It will come as no surprise, a few pages later, when the rage is unleashed against his daughter, while the son remains firmly in favour.

So Safetytown is authoritarian, sexist and – we know from earlier and will soon learn – intensely racist and homophobic. Christine is noticing at least some of it, and fuming.

The overall shape of the narrative is strongly implied on this page. Christine will incur her father’s wrath. Somehow she will find herself on the other side of the wall. Will she finally discover she has been lied to all her life? (Anyone who’s read any dystopian fiction would be astonished if the answer to that was no.) Will she escape or be exiled to the other side of the Wall? (See previous parenthesis.) Will she find a better world out there? (Likewise, you’d be pretty astonished at a no answer.) Will she find happiness with the beautiful brown servant woman, and will that woman have a name? (See previous parenthesis.) Will she play a role in bring Safetytown down? (One would certainly hope so, but that would mean she’d have to make giant strides out of her complacent self-absorption.) Perhaps most importantly for the success of the novel: are there any surprises? (No spoiler alert, but yes.) Does it get preposterous? (Yes – in many ways, but mainly in a delightful sequence that could only have been imagined by someone who lives in Naarm/Melbourne and loves it with a passion.)

Bill Holloway at The Australian Legend enjoyed this book less than Claire G. Coleman’s two previous novels, Terra Nullius (Hachette Australia 2017) and The Old Lie (Hachette Australia 2019). I take that as encouragement to go looking for them.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.

* It’s my current age.

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Annie Ernaux’s Man’s Place at the Book Group

Posted on 8 May 2025 | 3 comments

Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place (La Place ©1983, translation © Tanya Leslie 1992)

Alphonse Duchesne, who ran a small cafe/grocery in Normandy with his wife, died in 1967, two months after his daughter Annie Ernaux qualified as a school teacher, marking a transition in the family’s class status. On the train journey home from the funeral, Ernaux writes:

I tried to keep my son entertained so that he would behave himself. People travelling first-class have no time for noise and restless children. I suddenly realised with astonishment, ‘Now I really am bourgeois,’ and ‘It’s too late.’ (Page 18)

Later that summer, she thought to herself, ‘One day I shall have to explain all this,’ meaning she needed to write about her father and the distance that had come between them during her adolescence: ‘Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.’

This short book – just 64 pages – is a rigorous, spare and unsparing, attempt to rise to that need. In 1982, having already written three novels, Ernaux set out to write a fourth one, about her father. But, she writes:

I realise now that a novel is out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. I shall collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared.

The book tells two stories: the life story of Ernaux’s father and – always in the present tense as if allowing us to look over her shoulder as she types – the self-reflexive story of the writing of the book.

The father was from a peasant background. His own father was illiterate, and he worked first as a farm hand, then as a factory worker and finally, along with his wife, ran the small grocery shop and café. He bickered with his wife, spoke a rustic version of French, never set foot in a museum, voted for reactionary politicians ‘for a lark, but without conviction’, was intensely proud of his daughter’s success in moving into the middle class but didn’t make any part of the transition with her.

Every now and then, Ernaux steps directly into the frame to say how long she has now been writing, explain that it is a slow process because she is avoiding her own emotional memories in order to focus on her father’s story. It’s not that she doesn’t draw on memory – as for example when she describes a photo of her father taken at her wedding reception, and recalls her sense of him at the moment it was taken, ‘certain that he wasn’t enjoying himself’. And through it all, told in flat unemotive language, the terrible undertow of the daughter moving away into a different world:

One day he said, ‘Books and music are all right for you. I don’t need them to live.’

This was the first of Annie Ernaux’s ‘autobiosociological’ books. It’s the fourth I’ve read, and with each one I become more grateful to the Nobel committee for drawing her to my attention. The others (with links to my blog posts) are:

After the meeting: I was a little apprehensive about this meeting, as I had picked the book. The job was sprung on me at the last meeting, it had to be a short book, and this was on my TBR list, so I named it on the spot without due consideration.

It turned out that, quite apart from the big plus of brevity, the book was generally much liked, and we had a discussion that made me glad all over again to be in the book group. At times the discussion was personal: one man honed in on the early part of the narrative when the family’s life was disrupted terribly by the bombing of Normandy in World War Two (a part of the narrative that had passed me by); a number of us drew parallels with the trajectories of our own lives – as the first generation in our families to go to university; and the conversation wandered, seemingly off-topic, to our relationships to our parents, and various ways in which the stories of different parents had been discovered and even published.

We had a wonderful difference of opinion. One man, call him K–, himself a recently retired small businessman, said that Annie Ernaux had completely failed to get that her father, as a small businessman, had made a life for himself that he was completely happy with: when Ernaux portrays him as ashamed of his lack of ‘culture’, that is complete projection. I must be just a little bit in love with Annie Ernaux because my defensive hackles went up, and I disagreed that the father was portrayed as anything other than happy with his life!

The back cover blurb of the Ftzcarraldo edition says that ‘Ernaux reveals the shame that haunted him throughout his life’. So K– isn’t alone in reading the book that way. I still disagree. But I’ve been reflecting for days, and while I still think K– was wrong, I believe he put his finger on something at the heart of the book.

There’s no doubt that Annie the character believed that she had a better life than her parents, that they were proud she had made the transition, that a gulf of mutual incomprehension developed between the generations. The father certainly feels shame in some social situations – not understanding what a school teacher means by ‘town clothes’, not being able to spell when filling out a form. It’s explicit that the people of the daughter’s world look on people like her father with scorn. But I don’t read Ernaux or her father as sharing their judgement. She lays out the detail of his world, and is pretty clear about her own ‘bourgeois’ perspective. When she mentions in passing that he votes for a reactionary politician ‘for a lark’, it’s clear that she disapproves, but her disapproval isn’t the point.

K– went hunting for passages to support his reading. His case doesn’t stand or fall by one tiny sample, but what he came up with was this, from when the 20-something Annie is visiting her parents:

As soon as I plugged in the bedside lamp, the wire blackened, sparks flew and the bulb went out. The lamp was in the shape of a ball resting on a marble base, with a brass rabbit standing upright, its front paws sicking out at its sides. I had once thought it very beautiful. It must have been broken for ages. Indifferent to things, they never got anything mended at home.

K– read the tone of that last sentence as something close to contempt: ‘These people are barely human, they care so little for their environment.’ I read it as more two-edged: ‘As the kind of person who travels first-class, I expect my things to function well and to meet certain aesthetic standards. My parents have different priorities, a much greater tolerance for imperfection.’

I’m going to reread the book.

The Book Group met on the land of Gadigal of the Eora nation. I wrote this blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the many generations of Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country.

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The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink

Posted on 29 Apr 2025 | 2 comments

Bernhard Schlink, The Granddaughter (©2021, translation by Charlotte Collins, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2024)

When I decided a couple of years ago to focus on just one page of a book when blogging about it, I intended it to be a way of cutting down on the time I spend on the blog, while still managing to have fun and hopefully say something interesting. It hasn’t always worked out that way. Too often, I’ve gone on at length about a book and then tacked on a discussion of page 76, 77, 78, 47 or, occasionally, 7.

I’m turning over a new leaf, starting with The Granddaughter.

If, like me, you’d read a couple of books by Bernhard Schlink – in my case The Reader (read before blogging), Guilt About the Past and The Weekend – you might pick this up in a bookshop expecting a novel in powerfully simple prose about Germany coming to terms with its past. You’d be right. If you knew nothing, and turned for a taste of the writing to an arbitrary page, say page 78, you’d find some writing that pulls you in, possibly enough to make you buy the book:

Two young women friends are spending time in a dacha in a forest in East Germany. One of them, the narrator, is pregnant. The other, who want to be a nurse, will assist at the birth. The narrator, who I can tell you is named Birgit, dreams of escaping to the West, with or without a man named Kaspar. At the same time, she is having a blissful time, finding happiness in the moment. This is clearly a period of respite:

I listened to the rain on the roof, the initial drops, the furious pelting of a rainstorm, the soft rustle of steady rain, the last drops falling from the branches above the dacha. Sometimes Paula and I just slipped on dresses and walked through the warm rain till the wet dresses stuck to us and we laughed as we helped each other take them off again and jumped off the jetty into the water.

I learnt to love the forest. My mother never took her daughters to the forest. When we went on trips into the forest with the Young Pioneers and the FDJ, there were instructions to be followed and assignments to be completed, and we did everything busily and noisily. The forest around the lagoon was quiet.

The FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend/Free German Youth) was the official youth wing of the German Democratic Republic and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Returning to this page having read the whole book, I’m in awe at its place in the whole. Most of the book is told from Klaus’s perspective, but this is in the middle of 60 pages in Birgit’s voice, a document written by her decades after the time in the forest and found by her husband – Klaus – after her death. He learns for the first time of her pregnancy, and gains some understanding of the long term emotional toll of her escape to the West to be with him. It’s not a spoiler to say that Brigid ends up filled with alcoholic despair – that’s how the book starts. And here, on page 78, in spare, unsentimental prose, in what seems like just a pause in the narrative, Schlink gives us a glimpse of the deep attachment to place that was to be ruptured by her move, as important perhaps as the haunting presence of the baby she decided to leave.

After reading the manuscript Klaus, now a bookseller, decides to go in search of the daughter. She turns out, after a troubled childhood and adolescence, to have joined a right-wing, Holocaust-denying, white-supremacist völkisch community. The main relationship in the book is between Klaus, good liberal Westerner, and Birgit’s granddaughter, who has taken on her parents’ ideology with the absolutism of childhood. Birgit’s tiny moment on page 78 of learning to love the forest, which transcends the political demands of her society, finds a kind of correlative in her granddaughter’s love of music, which Klaus seeks to foster. It’s also echoed in a perverse way in the völkisch elevation of ‘blood and soil’.

Bernhard Schlink is a lawyer and a retired academic. In each of his novels that I have read, individuals try to find their way with integrity in complex moral and political terrain. Complicity in the Holocaust in The Reader, left-wing guerrilla activity / terrorism in The Weekend. And here, unresolved issues from German ‘unification’ and the rise of neo-Nazi sentiment and activity. Like his hero Klaus with his granddaughter, Schlink refrains from lecturing, and approaches the people with whom he disagrees with respect, struggling to understand. Birgit’s joy in the warm rain and the silent forest ad quietly and eloquently to that struggle.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this beautiful country, never ceded. I also acknowledge the Elders past and present of the Ma:Mu nation, custodians of the land where I spent my first 13 years.

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Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool at the Book Club

Posted on 28 Apr 2025 | 4 comments

Richard Russo, Everybody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2017)

Before the meeting: This is the second book in Richard Russo’s trilogy set in the dead-end town of North Bath in rural New York: it was preceded by Nobody’s Fool (1993) and followed by Somebody’s Fool (2023). I read it as a stand-alone. At about page 80 I went to Wikipedia for a synopsis of Nobody’s Fool, and really I needn’t have. (I also watched a trailer for Robert Benton’s 1994 movie, which was probably a mistake, as the image of Paul Newman as the character Sully was seriously different from the one I’d built up for myself, even allowing for the fact that Sully has aged 20 years since the first book.)

All the same, even for those who haven’t read about the characters’ earlier lives, it’s clear that they are living in various aftermaths. It begins with a burial and returns to the cemetery again and again. One man has been given a year to live, another is stuck in grief for his wife who died in the act of leaving him, a third has been released from jail and proclaims unconvincingly that he has turned over a new leaf. One couple remain affectionate though their affair is long since over, another deal with a long history of mental illness. Friendships endure in spite of mutual irritation, enmities are maintained in spite of deep-seated fellow-feeling. It’s complex, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes wretchedly painful, abounding in situational ironies. There are two violent deaths that we don’t witness, and one shockingly violent scene that we do. There are two villains, three if you count the out-of-town dealer in snakes and drugs. There’s a disgustingly incontinent dog. A couple of characters from the first book make cameo appearances, for no obvious reason apart from letting longterm readers know what they’re up to.

Class is ever-present. Most of the book’s characters know they have been excluded from the good things of life. They’re rough with each other, but there’s also kindness and integrity and a strong sense of belonging. At one point Sully, who has the strongest claim to be the main character, reflects that he has made sure ‘that his destination at the end of the day was a barstool among men who had chosen to be faithful to what they took to be their own natures, when instead they might have been faithful to their families or to convention or even to their own early promise’ (page 448). It’s an attitude that elsewhere might be called quiet despair, but here it includes an assertion of connection.

I enjoyed it a lot. It deals with serious themes, but it’s a lot of fun in all sorts of ways.

On page 78*, nobody is being nice to anyone, but nobody’s going anywhere. The scene is Harriet’s diner, one of the three eating and drinking establishments in the town. The characters are Ruth, owner of Harriet’s; her daughter Janey who has just come in complaining about a scene in her bathroom; Carl, a failing developer whose post-prostate-surgery incontinence (which everyone knows about) is responsibe for the bathroom scene; Roy, Janey’s violent ex-husband, fresh out of jail and claiming to have turned over a new leaf, who has just left; and Sully, one-time lover of Ruth, who now hangs around every day to be generally helpful and has just picked a fight with Roy. Ruth is speaking to Janey:

‘Sorry about the bathroom,’ she said, ‘but Carl had an accident.’ She emphasised the name ever so slightly. Remember? she seemed to be saying. What I told you about Carl?
‘Oh, right.’ Janey shrugged. ‘I guess that makes it okay.’
‘That was my thought,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m glad you agree.’
Janey rolled her eyes to show that she most certainly did not agree but wasn’t going to go to the mat over it, either. ‘Was that my idiot ex-husband’s voice I heard earlier?’ Ruth apparently took this to be a rhetorical question, because she didn’t bother answering. ‘He’s taking that restraining order real serious.’
… ‘He hasn’t caused any trouble so far, or even tried to,’ Ruth said, glancing at Sully. ‘Unlike some people.’
‘That’s the thing about Roy,’ Janey said, putting her now-empty mug into a plastic busing tub. ‘He won’t, until he does. But when he does, it’ll be my jaw that gets broke, like always.’
‘He breaks your jaw because you’re always mouthing off.’
‘No, he breaks it because he enjoys breaking it.’
‘Like you enjoy mouthing off,’ Ruth said as Janey brushed past her.
‘Well, jeez,’ Janey mused, pausing in the doorway to her apartment. ‘Let’s think a minute. Where the fuck do I get that from?’

I could probably have picked any page in the book and found similarly alive dialogue, and a similar complexity of relationships. Notice that Sully doesn’t say a word. Ruth’s glance in his direction comes from a woman you don’t want to cross. Likewise, we know that Janey is right about her ‘idiot ex-husband’, but Ruth isn’t gong to back down meekly. It’s no spoiler to say that Ruth’s attributing Roy’s violence to Janey’s mouthiness is rich with narrative irony: what she says in the heat of mother-daughter irritation is a standard blame-shifting rationale used by perpetrators of family violence. That irony goes deep in the light of events yet to come, but my lips are sealed.

After the meeting: We read this along with Christine Dwyer Hicks’s The Narrow Land (yesterday’s blog post here).

They’re very different books, and though I tried in my post on The Narrow Land to note things they had in common, no one else was much interested in such attempts. I’d say that a couple of us enjoyed this book much more than the other, but others not so much. One got to about 20 percent (this is how Kindle readers talk) and then went no further, another read about four percent. The first, probably being polite to those of us who enjoyed it, said that while she could see that the writing was very good, she had no desire to spend any more time in the depressing world of the novel.

Two of us talked about the human warmth and humour. I fond myself laughing helplessly as I recounted one of the more macabre episodes. Others remained stony-faced. The other person who found the book funny said it was like Carl Hiaasen’s work (‘Without alligators,’ I agreed). She also made a cogent argument for the book’s acknowledgement of class in a way that isn’t common in novels from the USA. Similarly civil but unconvinced response.

When I said I could imagine a movie adaptation directed by the Cohen brothers that seemed to bridge the chasm a little.

As I’m about to hit ‘Publish’, I realise that nowhere in my ‘Before the meeting’ section did I mention the wonderful comedic energy of the writing: the book opens with a bravura description of the North Bar cemetery; the town doesn’t have alligators, but it is terrorised by a king cobra; there are terrible smells; a building collapses like something out of a Buster Keaton movie. All of this seems to have passed most of the other club members by. Maybe you have to have to temporarily suspend solemn empathy as well as disbelief.

The Book Club on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land as rain poured down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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The Book Club at Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Narrow Land

Posted on 27 Apr 2025 | 10 comments

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Narrow Land (Atlantic 2019)

The cover of The Narrow Land features Edward Hopper’s painting Sea Watchers (1952). The back cover tells us the book is about a ten-year-old boy who forms an unlikely friendship with ‘the artists Jo and Edward Hopper’. But nowhere in the narrative itself are we told the names of the two artists, even though many of the man’s paintings are lovingly described and even a reader as ignorant about US art as I am could recognise some of them (admittedly with help from Duck Duck Go) as Hoppers. Nor is there an afterword or acknowledgement to clarify the story’s relationship to historical fact.

I don’t know what to make of that, since it looks as if a significant dimension of the book is a fictional depiction of Hopper’s practice and the Hopper marriage. In particular, to judge from Josephine Hopper’s Wikipedia entry, it’s likely that the narrative draws on her copious journals recording her bitterness and their stormy quarrels. The character’s journals are mentioned, but Josephine Hopper’s are not.

The Hoppers-not-Hoppers, she in her sixties and he quite a bit older, have a terrible relationship. They are at their Cape Cod house for the summer in the early 1950s. He is stuck, searching for inspiration. She lives in his shadow, resents his failure to support her work, nags at him to get on with his own, is hyper-alert to possibilities that he will be attracted to other women, and relentlessly picks fights with him. He is relentless right back at her. They’re not people you want to be around.

Ten-year-old Michael comes into their lives. He is a German war orphan, possibly Jewish, brought to the US and adopted by a working-class couple in New York, spending the summer with a benefactor who is the artists’ neighbour.

Relationships develop among these characters, including Michael’s complex host family. The narrow land of the title refers literally to Cape Cod, as in this map. It also refers, I think, to the narrowness of a non-combatant USer’s world-view: Michael’s hosts are unable to imagine the magnitude of what he has endured (which he experiences now as nightmarish flashes of memory). The narrowness is also there in the constrictions that society places on the artist, and the claustrophobia that ‘Mrs Aitch’ rails against in her marriage. Perhaps it refers also to the limits imposed on people’s lives in the wake of the Second World War – partners, parents and siblings are still being mourned, and returned soldiers wander through the narrative like wraiths.

For the most part, this isn’t a pleasant read. I found Mrs Aitch especially painful – like Pansy in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, her bitterness is unremitting, but she lacks Pansy’s biting wit. Unlike Pansy though, she finds temporary relief in connection with children – Michael and his obnoxious host Richie – where we get to see her in a more positive light. Also unlike Pansy, she has a moment when her intolerant discontent saves the day.

Having just described Richie as obnoxious, I feel obliged to say that even though almost all of the characters are unlikeable, most of them have moments when we see an underlying pain. We come to see Richie in particular as tragic.

Page 78* turns out to be a good example of my pervasive frustration. It’s near the start of the novel’s second section, titled ‘Venus’, in which we realise that ‘he’ – Hopper-not-Hopper – is searching for a woman he glimpsed the previous summer, as he feels that she will inspire him now. (Spoilerish note: he does find her, but it doesn’t work.) On this page he remembers the day that he found her:

She was standing in the doorway of a house, a man standing on the threshold, maybe leaving or maybe hoping to get inside.
He’d driven by and pulled in further along the street. Then he walked back past the house. There had been a bush by the gate, tangled and dried up from the heat, a lawn, yellowed by neglect and the ravages of a long summer.

There’s a description of her clothes and a snippet of overheard conversation, then:

He had walked on for a couple of minutes. then crossed the road to return on the opposite side, his head tilted as if he were searching for the number of a door. As he came closer to the house, he saw her lift her hands and put them under her hair, which was a whiter shade of blonde. Then she flipped it all up, holding it for a few seconds to the back of her head. He could see the damp patches of sweat stamped into her armpits and the outline of her long neck, the soft curve where it joined her shoulders. She dropped her hair and her face lifted upwards. The blue blouse. The light on her face. He couldn’t figure out if it was pouring into her or pouring out of her. He thought she looked sanctified. Then he thought she looked the opposite.

He rushes home and drags out his easel:

He laid it down: the street, the house, the figure of the girl in the doorway, the figure of the man alongside it with one foot on the step, the lawn, the gate, the tangled bush.

This is emphatically an account of a particular artist’s creative process. It’s as if the novelist sets out to imagine for us how Edward Hopper created one of his paintings, but then – for legal reasons, perhaps, or from simple respect for the unknowability of the real man – pulls back from acknowledging that that’s what she’s doing. The understated eroticism here plays nicely into the portrait of the artist’s marriage: his wife (never named) realises that she is not the model for the woman in the painting, and is furious.

On the way to the meeting: We read The Narrow Land along with Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool. Just before the meeting I’m noting some things the books have in common:

  • they both have dogs that make a mess of cars – the disgustingly incontinent Rub in Everybody’s Fool, and Buster in this book who leaves a car ‘looking like a feathered nest’
  • characters read books: Sully in Everybody’s Fool remembers as a boy reading the beginning of a book we recognise as David Copperfield (Dickens), and discarding it; Michael in this book reads The Red Pony (Steinbeck) and Tom Sawyer (Twain) and takes them in his stride
  • Class looms large: when Michael’s working-class foster parents turn up we suddenly feel grounded in honest relationships; when Sully’s son turns up in the other book, we’re away with the abstractions of middle-class life.

After the meeting: The books had to compete with the pope’s funeral on the TV, but we still had an interesting conversation.

I think we were all a bit perplexed by A Narrow Land – not quite sure where its focus is. The person who had first proposed it, an artist herself, kicked the conversation off by saying that she was disappointed the book had so little to say about Hopper’s process, and in a way we circled around that central absence for the rest of our conversation.

One other person shared my unease about the relationship between the fictional characters and the historical persons. Others had no problem with it, and I still find it hard to say precisely what my problem is. Our host produced a hefty volume of Hopper’s work and we tried to pin down the paintings he works on in the book. No one claimed to have enjoyed the book unreservedly, though I think we all found some joy, or at least pleasure, in it. No one was much interested in trying to compare the two books.

We met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Eileen Chong’s We Speak of Flowers

Posted on 24 Apr 2025 | 1 comment

Eileen Chong, We Speak of Flowers (UQP 2025)

The author’s note at the start of this book begins:

We Speak of Flowers is a book-length poem in 101 fragments that can be read in any order. Each reading will construct the poem anew, and the shifting juxtapositions will give rise to innumerable permutations of the poem.

Considered as a book-length poem, the book is an elegy for the poet’s beloved grandmother. It also deals with other losses, especially those that come with being a member of the Chinese diaspora (and within that, of Hakka, Hokkien and Peranakan heritage). The dedication reads, ‘A poem for my ancestors’. But this isn’t a book with tunnel vision: there are Covid poems, childhood recollections, observations of life in Sydney, travels, meditations on artworks, and – as you expect if you’ve read any of Eileen Chong’s previous five collections – plenty of food. Images from Buddhist funerary rituals recur, and the clicking of mah jong tiles is heard more than once.

The author’s note goes on to explain that in Buddhist belief, the soul of a person who has died is reborn after 100 days, so the hundredth day ‘marks the end of the formal process of grieving the dead’. The 101st poem/fragment marks the moment of the soul’s reincarnation. The end is also a beginning. The invitation to read in any order implies that the grieving can begin and end with any one of the 101 fragments. Contrary to popular oversimplifications of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross‘s thinking, grieving is not a linear process. At the Gleebooks launch earlier this year, Eileen described the book as a choose-your-own-grief-adventure.

This sets up us for a tremendously complex – and engrossing – reading experience. I’ll limit this blog post to beginnings and endings.

In the book’s order, Fragment 1 consists of just two lines spaced widely apart on the page: ‘a singular, cracked voice // words matter, can still rise –’. In context this is the moment when a person caught in the intensity of immediate bereavement realises that they can still speak/write, and so the process of grieving can begin. It’s a perfect place for the larger poem to start. Fragment 101 begins, ‘And what did you leave me / in the end?’ I won’t quote the rest of it, just say that it brings the sequence to a perfect, heartbreaking end.

Though I found Eileen’s order very satisfying, I obediently ran the numbers 1 to 101 through a randomising program, and followed the resulting order for my second and subsequent readings.

In this order, the larger poem begins with Fragment 19:

The poem consists of five three-line stanzas (triplets), a form this poet uses often. And as in many of her poems, there are some brilliant line breaks. One of several Covid poems, it captures a moment in our shared history. Beginning with a striking image of queues – for Centrelink, perhaps, or at a testing station – it goes on to evoke the loneliness, underlying dread and obsession with statistics that characterised lockdown days for many of us. I love this:

Imagine the touch of a stranger – an unknown gift,
a leap of faith. A breath and its attendant dangers.

What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed!

The fragment works brilliantly as the beginning of the larger poem. We learn later that the poet’s grandmother died when Covid restrictions were in place, and the poet and her Sydney-based parents weren’t unable to attend the Singapore funeral. So this poem establishes the setting for the main story. And there’s something else:

Sheets pulled back like a discarded shroud.

The image suggests a resurrection – that waking and getting out of bed, perhaps after an illness, is to have avoided death. But it also reminds us that not everyone has avoided it, foreshadowing the overarching theme of bereavement.

In my ordering the poet’s grandmother doesn’t appear until the third poem (Fragment 72), where she is very much alive at the mah jong table:

She pulls a tile and runs her thumb
along its underside, over its carved
indentations.

My randomised sequence ends with Fragment 69:

This is one of Eileen’s many poems exploring her family history and heritage. As often happens with these poems, I find myself thinking about my own very different heritage, but with a powerful sense of what is in common. When I blogged about her ‘Burning Rice’ (here), for instance, I brooded on the role of sugar in my life as the son of a sugar farmer. My forebears came to this country, some ‘squinting towards dry land from the deck / of a ship’, some as convicts ‘packed into the hull’. I guess that’s a way of saying that while the poem has specific historical references (about which I am vague), it somehow – as good poems do – makes a bridge to other, different experiences. This isn’t closed-off identity poetry. The ethical questions it poses aren’t just for people of Hokkien heritage.

I keep wanting the first line of the second triplet to be, ‘How dare you tell …’ That is, I want the lines to challenge anyone who passes judgment on survivors. But the actual words, ‘How do you tell …’, appear to endorse the stark ethical principle that it is better to die than to live by oppressing other people. Lines 4 to 7 ask how to communicate that principle to people who have made the choice to live in those circumstances. The question is left hanging and the poem moves on: in response to oppression, there are just three options: to bend, to break or to plot rebellion. The final triplet arrives at what is surely a doctrine of despair: no matter what we do we all end up dead. The dragon and the phoenix, traditionally paired in Chinese art and literature to represent harmony and prosperity, are possessed only as scrawled images on paper, and that paper will burn in a funeral ceremony.

How does this fragment function as the final moment in this longer poem?

Astonishingly well, as it turns out. For one thing, the image of standing in line occurs in both first and last poems. In Fragment 19, people line up around the block clutching at ‘bags, papers, proof of lack’, hoping for something. In Fragment 69, standing in line becomes a metaphor for a doomed aspirational life. We will never reach the front of the queue – it’s a ‘lie that we will be next’ – and what we possess is ‘nothing but scrawl’, paper ideals that will be destroyed at the funeral.

This fragment doesn’t end the sequence with the notion of rebirth or transcendence, but with resignation to the finality of death. The ship has reached its harbour. The funerary papers have been burned. There’s nothing left but profound sorrow.

At the launch, Eileen said, ‘I’m really a cheerful person.’ And I don’t want this blog post give the impression that We Speak of Flowers is a gloomy book. On the contrary, it deals with grief, it refuses to idealise or prettify its subject, but it’s still full of colour and light and the magic of language. Maybe I can leave you with the final couplet of Fragment 34 – which in my randomised order is Nº 78, the number that I usually blog about:

death in the afternoon
wild plants still flower

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where the earth’s processes are asserting themselves in heavy downpours followed by brilliant blue skies. I acknowledge the hundred of generations of past Elders, and present Elders, of both countries, never ceded.

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