Two more journals in my endless attempt to keep up to date!
Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 252 (Spring 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website – I’ve included links)
This Overland‘s editorial describes itself as a ‘second run’. The first run had reflected on the Voice referendum, but as publication came closer – in October last year – ‘the temptation to linger on the politics of symbolic recognition and constitutional reform seems a luxury in the face of escalating violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank’. With feet and throats sore from a solidarity march, the editors draw attention to an essay by Palestinian-Australian writer and historian Micaela Sahhar, ‘which reminds [them] of Overland‘s historic role in indexing Palestine’s survival and resistance’.
Quite apart from its serendipitous relevance, the essay, ‘An idiosyncratic archive: Overland 169 & the Wolstonecroft years‘, is a joy to read, as Sahhar revisits two copies of Overland she acquired in 2002 and 2004. She compares her reading of them then and now, talks of her relationships to people who appeared in them, and generally takes us on a journey into her mind. I love this passage – and so, I assume, do the editors:
As a journal at odds with the mainstream, Overland offered a younger version of me an intellectual place where radical thinking could reside, and a dawning awareness of a community I could take a place in. In this sense, Overland was the tangible expression of a counter to the indifference and invisibility of a young Palestinian woman, the significance of whose identity was rewritten just as she came of age at the time of a catastrophic intellectual nadir represented in 9/11; and a place of refusal against socio-political disengagement and apathy which have been the horsemen of these neo-liberal times.
The other stand-out essay is ‘The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature‘ by Vivian Blaxell, which ranges far and wide, high and low, into memoir and poetry appreciation, circling the subject of beauty. It’s a great read, from which I can’t resist quoting what may be the silliest paragraph, but one that made me laugh:
Australian English is wanton with beautiful. Beauty pops up in not the usual beautiful places there, thereby revealing the radical contingency of beauty itself, probably unintentionally: beautiful, Australians might say of a pork sausage, which seems a surprise at first until you realise that beauty does not exist before we say it exists, for beauty relies entirely on disclosure for its existence. That lucky sausage.
Other essays are a discussion by Peter D Mathews of Sophie Cunningham’s 2004 novel Geography and an idiosyncratic but fascinating essay by πO on concrete poetry in Australia and related matters.
There are five pieces of fiction and nine poems.
Of the poetry, ‘Balloch’ by Eileen Chong stands out for me. An apparently simple poem about a visit to a Scottish loch, it leaves an uncanny aftertaste that only gets richer with further readings.
The fiction covers a wide range, from a celebration of Rotuman culture (I had to look it up) by Dorell Ben to a fantasy of a catastrophic world post climate emergency by Jodie How, with a little social realism by Chloe Hillary and other pieces in between.
Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 12 (Giramondo 2023)
This may be my last issue of Heat before my subscription expires. Despite having a selection of poems from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a book I’m looking forward to, the journal is a bit of a fizzer for me, though the dominating US presence I’ve complained of in earlier issues is absent, and only one member of Heat‘s editorial advisory board gets a guernsey.
- You can read Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Redundant‘ on the Heat website. It’s an experimental prose piece in which the experiment seems to consist of not finishing sentences. See what you think.
- Jordi Infeld’s ‘Poet’s Pocket’ would and indeed does pass for a short essay on sewing and related matters – just a footnote identifying one of its otherwise unremarkable phrases as a quote from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons suggests deeper undercurrents.
- ‘The Phoenix Apartment’ by Bella Li feels to me like notes towards a larger project.
Items from beyond the Anglosphere are ‘We Shall Be Monsters’, a meditation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Argentinian writer Esther Cross, translated by Alice Whitmore, and six terrific short poems by Iranian Maryam Nazarian, translated by Malaysia-based Arash Kohshsafa. Here’s the first and shortest of the poems, which does wonderful things with an echo of William Carlos Williams’s poem about the plums:
One
I've set the breakfast, the kisses, and the keys on the table.
Please, forgive me
if I find freedom more pleasant than your love.
The most interesting piece is Stephanie Radok’s ‘Inventory 2020’, an impressionistic chronicle of a working artist’s life, made up of mostly very short entries. It reminded me of the late Antigone Kefala’s journals in the way it combined observations of the passing moment with considered reflections and descriptions of the artist’s process. As 2020 was a year when the even tenor of our lives was disrupted by Covid, a narrative emerges. Here’s the entry for 23 February, on page 77*:
23. What you thought was passing/casual was your life. And a particular red purple near a blue hillside that seemed to reflect you.
As for Nam Le’s poems, they seem to be part of a larger whole. I’ll wait for the book.
* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book or journal that coincides with my age.
Me fail? I fly! 