Cirrus@Austlit

'This article looks at some poems by Polish Australian writer Andrzej Chciuk (1920-1978). Chciuk migrated to Australia from France in 1951, having escaped Nazi-occupied Poland as a twenty-year-old in 1940. In Australia he worked as a schoolteacher in Melbourne while continuing to write poetry and fiction in Polish. His work was published in prestigious Polish emigré outlets like the Paris-based journal Kultura and in Australia with sponsorship from the Polish migrant community; to date no English translations of it have appeared. My article focuses on a sequence of poems in his 1961 Pamiętnik poetycki (Poetic Memoir) called ‘Tamta Ziemia’ (That Other Land), about the cities and towns of Chciuk’s childhood: Lwów, Borysław and his hometown of Drohobycz. When the author was growing up these towns were in eastern Poland; by the time of his writing, in the 1950s, however, they had become part of Soviet Ukraine, and were thus doubly removed from his life in Australia. He wrote as a displaced person whose childhood home had itself been displaced. Hence the powerful note of longing that pervades his ‘poetic memoir’. Through a reading of some passages in my English translation, I hope to convey something of Chciuk’s lively poetic voice, and to show that he deserves admission to discussions of twentieth-century transnational Australian literature.'  (Publication abstract)

'It has been a source of wonder to me how the Netherlands has kept publishing sometimes quite arcane scholarly works when everywhere else has succumbed to market forces and multinational mergers. Despite (science-based) research measurements and other publishers’ reluctance to accept collections of conference papers, Rodopi, for some decades now, has managed to put out edited collections of literary studies grouped under the ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘postcolonial’ label, the best known being the ‘Cross/Cultures’ series. Some of its volumes have been influential in shifting critical focus and introducing new writing to the world.' 

'I grew up in a multicultural part of Melbourne in the 1970s and 80s, so many of my school friends were non-English speaking migrants – ‘New Australians’ or ‘wogs’, as they were sometimes called. The differences in culture and religious practice did not matter too much to us, and we played football and cricket together, rode our bikes around the streets, poked fun at the local grump, ‘Mr Froggy’, and made a small contribution to the benign delinquency in our neighbourhood. I shared everything with my friends, especially food: white paper bags of mixed lollies, steaming butcher-paper packages of hot chips, cans of RC Cola, and other treats we bought after school from the numerous corner shops we used to call milk bars. But we never shared a homemade lunch, and I never visited a migrant friend’s home for dinner. It was fine to play cricket and footy or go for long bike-rides with the Antons, Tonys and Spiros of my adolescent world, but that world had no place for their salami and smelly cheese. Migrant food was a cultural demarcation line that I instinctively would not cross.' (Introduction)

'J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel makes for difficult reading. I have read The Schooldays of Jesus three times, and each time I pick up a new thread to follow, but am somehow unable to piece together the work’s complete meaning (if there is ‘one meaning’). On the one hand, it references both Russian and Spanish literature (Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Cervantes’ Don Quixote) whilst alluding to the son of God in its title, and on the other, it can be read on its own as a meditation on the concepts of passion and memory. Like in 2013’s The Childhood of Jesus, we don’t see Jesus at all and he isn’t mentioned by name. In fact, we might as well be situated in a world where Jesus doesn’t exist, as the characters’ conversations lean toward the philosophical rather than the religious. There is not the slightest mention of religion or prayer. The elusiveness of the book’s titular character leads one to an allegorical reading, rather than a literal one. What the allegory is, though, I cannot be sure. We are privy not to the childhood and schooldays of Jesus the son of God, but of a self-assured young boy named Davíd, and his parents are not Joseph and The Virgin Mary, but two strangers: the boring middle-aged Simón and the sexless, perhaps virginal, Inés.' (Introduction)

'Susan Fealy’s poetry volume imparts intricate, visual, moody and surreal subtleties, with the alacrity and refinement of a true philologist. The narratives reconfigure the subject matter, making salient the beautiful, the tender, the refractorily timeless with immersion in experience. Symbolism, allegory, and metaphor are richly deployed throughout the volume. Most certainly, Fealy has a refined appreciation for art, literature, and film; her talent for transmuting these into poetic creations attests to this. The reverence however, rests more in the visual than the existential: even the very sad is still very visually pristine (Flute of Milk; In Lieu of a Statue).'  (Introduction)

'Stephen Orr is an Adelaide-based writer and teacher with several books to his name. Two of his works, Time’s Long Ruin (2010) and The Hands (2015), were longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary award. His latest work, Datsunland (2017) is a compilation of short stories, mostly set in Adelaide and country South Australia.' (Introduction)

'Haifa, Israel, May 2001, and a heavily pregnant woman, a doctor, is at the site of a bomb blast, picking her way carefully through the dead, perhaps looking for her husband who is not answering his phone. Her attention is suddenly caught by a coloured gemstone lying amid the rubble; ‘the last thing she sees before she passes out is a mangled body lying in a heap over in one corner. Red lipstick still perfectly frames the dead woman’s lips’.' (Introduction)

'In the opening poem of Rallying, Quinn Eades quotes the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray: ‘Call yourself. Give, yourself, names.’ then presents us with a fourteen-page poem in which the poet moves swiftly, however fragmentedly, from a little girl who cares for her sister, to a heroin addict and sex worker, to a male writer. There are other identities, too, that fall in between, each as crisply visualised as the one before. It’s called ‘How to disappear in your name’, and it’s an adapted form of haibun, where memories are a rush of prose, and reflections in short-stanza verse follows. And it’s stunning. It’s closely aligned with Eades’s fictocritical(ish) 2015 debut prose work, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, a book of non-fictive feminist poetics, a highlight of my reading last year. They were written side by side and they cover the same territory, but rather than see Rallying as a new way to write all the beginnings, I see it as a new way to write the body: the body as child, the used and addicted body, the mothering body which has its foundations in the female birthing and therefore the nourishing and giving body, the body in love, the trans body. In a single poem, which, unlike the rest of the poems in the book is not bracketed by a titled section but stands alone as its own body, so to speak, Eades paints the person who held each name, and each name comes together to culminate in ‘Quinn’, and in Quinn.' (Introduction)

'Emine Sevgi Özdamer’s protagonist in the tale Career of Char: Memories of Germany is ‘a witness of the solitude of the German high rise dwellers’. As she goes through her daily routine she ‘listens to the sounds of loneliness’1 and is able to inhabit only a rigidly fugitive state of mind.' (Introduction)

'Gender and madness appear in the question that opens this book: ‘What is a madwoman?’ (ix). The answer is provided through the lens of feminist literary theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory; Laura Deane is a lecturer at Flinders University with expertise in literary theory and world literature. As the title of the book also indicates, ‘Australian literature’ is the prime focus of her enquiry, with ‘colonial paranoia’ playing an important part in the analysis.'  (Introduction)

'Susan Sheridan’s latest book, The Fiction of Thea Astley, is a comprehensive cross-disciplinary analysis of the greater portion of Astley’s oeuvre. Interestingly, Sheridan’s analysis focuses primarily on the interrogation of the role of emotions in Astley’s novels and short stories. While the first chapter is aptly named, ‘A Study in Emotions’, it is from this platform which Sheridan launches her interrogation of the literary worlds created by Astley. Sheridan’s book is the perfect reader for researchers and enthusiasts interested in the broader thematic, generic and sociopolitical preoccupations of Astley’s bibliography. Sheridan is at her finest analytical self when she exposes the feministic undercurrent of Astley’s novels. She situates Astley’s works, as they should be, in a specific political and temporal space which Sheridan shows both creates and problematises Astley’s writing. This fierce indictment of the patriarchy is one of the key elements which Sheridan interrogates in Astley’s work.'  (Introduction)