Cirrus@Austlit

'The Somme, July 1916: like theatrical curtains, a blanket is pulled aside and an introverted soldier, Private Bourne, enters a dug-out. The eyes of all the men regard him: ‘Pitiless faces turned to see who it was as he entered, and after that flicker of interest relapsed into apathy and stupor again.’ Awaiting the order to enter battle, the infantrymen are weighed down with a sense of impending destiny, sitting ‘like men condemned to death’, and in ‘bitter resignation, with brooding enigmatic faces, hopeless, but undefeated’.' (Introduction)

'Earlier this year Rodney Hall published a new novel, A Stolen Season, which has been well received, and which will renew interest in his gifts as a fiction writer. As with his previous novels, including Just Relations (1982), Captivity Captive (1989), and Love without Hope(2008), Hall deploys his vivid style to create a morally engaged study of characters who are caught in states of psychological and emotional intensity. While Hall’s novels are themselves not as known as they should be, it is his significant body of work as a poet, consisting of a dozen collections from 1962 to 2002, which is especially forgotten. The interest around Hall’s new novel gives us the occasion to look again at his poetic oeuvre, which was once thought to be among the most outstanding in Australia but which now is seldom discussed or anthologized, and remains out-of-print.'  (Introduction)

'Judith Wright was in search of reconciliation. She had long been searching for older cultural forms that could be made suitable to express modern Australian life, and, now, as her long writing life was waning, she was also in search of a new literary identity and a contemplative poetic form. One of the fruits of this search was Wright's decision to write a dozen of her last poems in the form of the ghazal, which is common to Persian, Arabic, and Urdu literature. These dozen poems are entitled The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals, and come at the end of Phantom Dwelling, published in 1985. In her Collected Poems, 1942-1985, these are the poems that are placed at the end of the book. In a sense, they are the terminus of her poetry; she published nothing more between 1985 and and her death in 2000. That the last sequence of Eastern poetic format, and specifically by Persian poetry and the work and thought of Hafez of Shiraz, is considerable. Her Shadow of Fire sequence thus stands as a very significant event in the history of literary transaction between  Australian and Persian cultures.' (184)

'Tehran, April 1987: Going Under
'Descending in a stream of arpeggio broken chords: as we moved through night and the vernal air down into the green earth, my mother thought she heard a children’s song on the stairs as the bombs fell cascading. Like bells, bells of Hades sounding out inverted intervals, the bombs fell interminably. The sirens that were singing sang us downward to the damp islands of the underground shelter, a honeycomb under the Tehran metropolis, buzzing with heat-maddened, with death-maddened men and women. My mother was quick with child and as she ran barefoot down the spiralling stairs she was engulfed by the yawning mouth of the desecrated earth. It was two months shy of my birth. All was opaque and suffocating. Concrete shards broke and fell from the ceiling, missiles rained down in deluge. As a whale yawning wide, trenches on the battle-front split and men were dragged into the void. Later, as I came up out of the waters, I knew this sorrow would abide. I tasted a fruit with an ashen core and I saw over all the earth ashes and soot spread abroad, veiling the stars, this shroud.' (Introduction)