image of person or book cover 8658432044233161643.jpg
This image has been sourced from Booktopia
y separately published work icon Song of Less selected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Song of Less
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Madrid, Spain 2019. The end of the UN Climate Change Conference--another moral failure on the part of those who could have made change. I go back to the labour union hall that all the activist groups have been using as a headquarters to help with the clean-up. There are only a few of us left. I take on the communal kitchen and bin heads of broccoli gone to dusty seed and half-used jars of slimy lima beans. I wash towers of greasy plastic cups with cold water and floor cleaner, because that's all there is. The door to the room that held the expensive sound equipment has been broken--no, not just broken, but thoroughly smashed. There is talk of a missing key, something lost in translation. The word 'smithereens' comes to mind.

'In a back room littered with cardboard and paint tins, I find a giant papier-mache head of a grandmother that First Nations activists fashioned for their part in the climate march. Alone in the echoing halls, it feels like silence and time are demanding something of me--an act of great care--though I don't know how to rise to it. The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark; deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into the ground. From somewhere offstage, a misery of voices starts to murmur in the scrounge. What starts up is a grief work. I wrap the grandmother head in a pall of plastic sheeting and carry it across the city to Desperate Literature bookshop in the rain.' (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Cordite Press , 2022 .
      image of person or book cover 8658432044233161643.jpg
      This image has been sourced from Booktopia
      Extent: 86p.
      Note/s:
      • Published: 1st January 2022
      ISBN: 9780648917632
      Series: y separately published work icon CorditeBooks : Series 4 CorditeBooks : Series Four Melbourne : Cordite Press , 2020 18546022 2020 series - publisher poetry Number in series: 10

Works about this Work

All Futures Are Possible Patrick Allington , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , December 2022;

— Review of Song of Less Joan Fleming , 2022 selected work poetry ; Every Version of You Grace Chan , 2022 single work novel

'Early in Grace Chan’s novel Every Version of You, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin pass a monument erected at Melbourne’s Federation Square that commemorates the deaths caused by a US airstrike in 2041 – the attack, by now, a distant memory. At one point in Joan Fleming’s verse novel Song of Less, a character called Cousin Groundpigeon says ‘Remember countries?’ ' (Introduction)   

Dystopic Presents and Futures : Two Disquieting Verse Novels Geoff Page , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 43-44)

— Review of Song of Less Joan Fleming , 2022 selected work poetry ; Blight Street . Geoff Goodfellow , 2021 selected work poetry
'In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick is just one of the poets who are making it an important part of the Young Adult field. A series of interviews with Australasian verse novelists (The Verse Novel), edited by Linda Weste, has recently gone into a second edition.' (Introduction)
Dystopic Presents and Futures : Two Disquieting Verse Novels Geoff Page , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 43-44)

— Review of Song of Less Joan Fleming , 2022 selected work poetry ; Blight Street . Geoff Goodfellow , 2021 selected work poetry
'In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick is just one of the poets who are making it an important part of the Young Adult field. A series of interviews with Australasian verse novelists (The Verse Novel), edited by Linda Weste, has recently gone into a second edition.' (Introduction)
All Futures Are Possible Patrick Allington , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , December 2022;

— Review of Song of Less Joan Fleming , 2022 selected work poetry ; Every Version of You Grace Chan , 2022 single work novel

'Early in Grace Chan’s novel Every Version of You, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin pass a monument erected at Melbourne’s Federation Square that commemorates the deaths caused by a US airstrike in 2041 – the attack, by now, a distant memory. At one point in Joan Fleming’s verse novel Song of Less, a character called Cousin Groundpigeon says ‘Remember countries?’ ' (Introduction)   

Last amended 13 Jan 2022 13:54:40
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X