Cirrus@Austlit

'Brian Castro’s book-length narrative poem, Blindness and Rage, announces its agenda and its titular phrase in the first of its thirty-four cantos. Lucien Gracq, a retired town planner from Adelaide, is given a terminal cancer diagnosis. He decides to up sticks and head to Paris to complete his magnum opus, the epic poem Paidia, incognito and donate its authorship to a deserving poet according to the rules of the Fugitives, a secretive society of ‘terminal poets.’ Driven by the demons of the poem’s title, Gracq digresses into personal memory and literary memory. When the potential for love intervenes, the blurring of these lines of self and literature takes him to a different geography altogether and finally leads him home. When presented in a nutshell this seems a satisfying narrative arc. But this is poetry, where a multitude of complications and stimulations await the reader: is this an epic poem or an inflected meditation on the epic? Why does Lucien Gracq choose Paris, and what might his name have to do with this choice? What might we make of his habits of literary reference and his favourite writers? Finally, how do we discern the relationships between personal history, literary history, and the construction of a literary persona?' (Introduction)

'Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends. This choice of adjective risks sounding rapturous or breathless, but it speaks to the visionary and startling qualities of the work of this Filipino-Australian author, as well as her work’s range. An award-winning transnational, cross-disciplinary writer and scholar, Bobis is the author of prose fiction and poetry, academic discourse, and dramatic works for radio and stage. She writes in Bikol, Filipino and English, demonstrating what the critic Dolores Herrero has described as a ‘defiant willingness’ to engage with her ‘rich bicultural heritage’.'(Introduction)

'Written over a period of nine years, Australia Day is a book of short stories by Melanie Cheng. It was the winner of the Award for an Unpublished Manuscript at the Victorian Premier’s Prize in 2016. Along with Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Sakr, Lachlan Brown, Michelle Cahill and Alice Pung, Cheng is part of a rising wave of culturally diverse writers concerned with the idea of Australia itself. Cheng herself has glossed Australia Day as a collection about ‘chance encounter, family, multiculturalism, identity.’' (Introduction)

'At a recent and highly irregular literary conference, a silver-haired professor explained that he had come to acquire his reputation by making of books ‘what others had made of religion.’ The conference at which the silver-haired professor made this utterance was unusual for a number of reasons – the most obvious being that it was taking place at a small golf club in rural Victoria, and that Gerald Murnane was working the bar. Adding to the strangeness of Murnane’s presence, within the boxed confines of the club’s bar, was the fact that the author’s work was the central subject of the event’s presentations. Each academic who stood behind the Rotary Club lectern to give their talk would have to handle the intense activity of the author, busying himself in the background with the club’s ledger, cleaning glasses, and helping the ladies in the kitchen prepare the scones and jam.' (Introduction)

'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)