y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 446 September 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the September issue of ABR. This month we look outwards, with articles on international politics and international relations. Our cover features include two compelling articles on Afghanistan by Kieran Pender and Kevin Foster, while James Curran examines Australia’s complicated relations with China. Elsewhere in the issue, Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews a new biography of Vladimir Putin and Luke Stegemann reviews two other books on Russia, including Fitzpatrick’s latest history of the Soviet Union. Alison Broinowski examines a new book by former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Also in the issue are reviews of new fiction from Sophie Cunningham, Siang Lu and Paul Daley along with Michael Hofmann’s appraisal of Elizabeth Hardwick’s uncollected essays. Other highlights include Tara McEvoy on Seamus Heaney in Australia and Michael Garbutt on Paris’s Museum of Mankind.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  • Contents indexed selectively.

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
‘The Verity of His Company’ Seamus Heaney in Australia, Tara Mcevoy , single work essay
'Think of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and you mightn’t automatically think of Australia. What the name invokes for most readers, I would hazard, are the vivid landscapes of Ireland (‘The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / of soggy peat’). Heaney (1939–2013) might have been a man of the world, but he was rooted half a world away.' 

(Introduction)

(p. 22-24)
Spectres and Refractions : Sophie Cunningham’s New Novel, Ann-Marie Priest , single work review
— Review of This Devastating Fever Sophie Cunningham , 2022 single work novel ;

'Early in This Devastating Fever, a writer named Alice has a difficult conversation with her agent, Sarah, about the novel she is working on, which she is considering calling This Devastating Fever. The novel is supposed to be about Leonard Woolf, left-wing journalist and activist, novelist, publisher, best-selling memoirist, and husband of Virginia Woolf, whom he outlived by almost thirty years. Things are not going well for Alice, however. She cannot settle on a theme (the parallels between Leonard’s era and her own proliferate alarmingly) or an approach (experimental approaches have failed her, historical fiction bores her), and her agent is increasingly concerned. In its current iteration, the book is both fiction and non-fiction – which makes it potentially unsaleable, Sarah tells Alice sternly. Forced to choose, Alice picks fiction.' (Introduction)

(p. 27)
Dreams and Debris : Siang Lu’s Ambitious Début Novel, Dilan Gunawardana , single work review
— Review of The Whitewash Siang Lu , 2022 single work novel ;

'Hong Kong’s hottest property, JK Jr, has it all: boyish charm, acting chops, and a set of ‘crazy ripped’ abs. He’s set to star in Brood Empire, a spy thriller backed by the financial might of Hollywood and China, and destined to smash box-office records in all markets. However, the new era of mainstream western films featuring hunky Asian male leads must wait, as the whole enterprise suddenly falls apart. Enter a not-so-humble web tabloid to piece together this sordid tale of hubris and unfulfilled dreams from the debris.' (Introduction)

(p. 28)
The Construction of History : Exploring the Impact of Colonialism, Susan Midalia , single work review
— Review of Jesustown Paul Daley , 2021 single work novel ;

'Paul Daley will be familiar to many readers as a respected journalist expressly committed to exposing the blind spots of white culture’s dominant myths about Indigenous history and Australia’s national identity. Daley is perhaps less well known as a novelist and playwright. These two interests in his work – historical research and imaginative writing – inform his powerful second novel, Jesustown, Daley’s seventh book, and one which he felt ‘compelled’ to write.' (Introduction)

(p. 29)
Serious Matters : Two Recent Medical Thrillers, Debra Adelaide , single work review
— Review of Cut Susan White , 2022 single work novel ; The Registrar Neela Janakiramanan , 2022 single work novel ;

'It can only be coincidence that two very similar novels have been produced by contemporary doctors, but the overlapping characters and themes of Cut and The Registrar are so striking that it’s hard not to visualise their authors, Susan White and Neela Janakiramanan, getting together somewhere to sketch out their early drafts. Both novels feature young female protagonists working in teaching hospitals, who are as dedicated to their patients as they are to advancing their careers.' (Introduction)

(p. 30-31)
Reworking the Narrative : A Critical Study of Amanda Lohrey’s Writing, Brenda Walker , single work review
— Review of Lohrey Julieanne Lamond , 2022 selected work essay ;

'The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Chartres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.' (Introduction)

(p. 31-32)
Freyai"Scene like a Banksy mural:", Hessom Razavi , single work poetry (p. 32)
Harbouri"As if", Judith Bishop , single work poetry (p. 33)
Weaving and Brewing : A Lifetime of Bookish Immersion, Gregory Day , single work review
— Review of Telltale : Reading Writing Remembering Carmel Bird , 2022 single work prose ;
'On 1985, the American poet and essayist Susan Howe deftly jettisoned any pretensions to objectivity in the field of literary analysis with her ground-breaking critical work My Emily Dickinson. The possessive pronoun in Howe’s title says it all: when a writer’s work goes out to its readers, it reignites in any number of imaginative and emotional contexts. What rich and varied screens we project onto everything we read.' (Introduction)
(p. 41)
Public and Private Lives : A Controversial Diplomat and Bureaucrat, Peter Edwards , single work review
— Review of Persons of Interest : An Intimate Account of Cecily and John Burton Pamela Burton , Meredith Edwards , 2022 single work biography ;

'Persons of Interest does not fit readily into any familiar genre. It crosses the borders of biography, psychology, Cold War history, and family studies. When Pamela Burton and her sister Meredith Edwards decided to write a book about their parents, they realised that different readerships would be attracted to different parts. Who would be interested in a book about the marriage, and the post-divorce lives, of a man who had been a central figure in public controversies many decades ago and a sensitive, introspective woman who was little known to the public but for whom their daughters felt far greater sympathy? By crossing those borders with what their prologue calls ‘a unique, intimate and candid account of our parents’ complexities and interweaving relationships’, they have written a book that will be ‘of interest’ to many readers, no matter what their usual focus.'(Introduction)

(p. 44-45)
Poetic Choreography : A Further Selected Poems from Robert Gray, Judith Beveridge , single work review
— Review of Rain Towards Morning : Selected Poems Robert Gray , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'According to his author’s note, Rain Towards Morning is ‘a definitive book’ of the poems Robert Gray wishes to preserve. Nameless Earth (Carcanet, 2006) is the most generously represented of Gray’s previous eight books. This is followed by his mid-career volume Piano (1988) in which he first began to publish a range of poetry with tight rhyme schemes and controlled rhythms. More than a third of the poems Gray has chosen for Rain Towards Morning are these formal or semi-formal compositions, indicating that he wishes to showcase this aspect of his work. Fewer poems have been chosen from his free verse books Grass Script (1978), The Skylight (1983) and Afterimages (2002), arguably his best books.'(Introduction)

(p. 46-47)
Labours of Disruption : Two Bold Poetry Collections, Rose Lucas , single work review
— Review of Beginning in Sight Theodore Ell , 2022 selected work poetry ; Trap Landscape Nick Powell , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'One of the many life-challenging things that poetry can do is to prise open unexpected spaces and take us somewhere entirely unanticipated, whether it be in terms of how we live, how we understand the world, or how we link the fabric of textual utterance with that of our lived experience. These two new poetry collections set about this labour of disruption in very different ways, demonstrating some of the pathways available between poet and reader.' (Introduction)

(p. 47-48)
Absolute Devotion : Lionel Fogarty’s Unique Poetic Consciousness, Philip Morrissey , single work review
— Review of Harvest Lingo Lionel Fogarty , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'If nothing else, Lionel Fogarty’s longevity as a poet should bring him to our attention. Kargun, his first work, was published forty-two years ago amid the ferment of utopian Black Panther politics, discriminatory legislation, and racialised police violence. Fogarty’s finest work, Ngutji, published in 1984, drew on his experience growing up in Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, but the breadth of his poetic vision was already evident. Some of the early poems such as ‘Jephson Street Brothers Who Had None’ and ‘Remember Something Like This’ originate in Fogarty’s experience of Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission and radical politics, but the poems’ truths are non-propositional and essentially human.' (Introduction)

(p. 48-49)
White Space of the Unknowable : A Daughter’s Fragments of Memory, Sarah Gory , single work review
— Review of Life with Birds Bronwyn Rennex , 2022 single work prose ;

'Ostensibly, Life with Birds is about the author’s search for her father, a Vietnam War veteran who died when she was young and whose story she hardly knew. As I read it, though, I was reminded of a line from Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal oral history The Unwomanly Face of War (2017): ‘Women’s stories are different and about different things.’ In the end, Life with Birds is less about men and war than about the women left behind – in this case, three daughters and a wife – and the shape of their lives in the wake of his silence, and then his absence.' (Introduction)

(p. 50)
Tangible Results : Reflections of a Literary Jurist, Michael Sexton , single work review
— Review of Bench and Book Nicholas Hasluck , 2021 single work autobiography ;
'Nicholas Hasluck is that relatively rare combination of practising lawyer and accomplished writer. A former judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, he has also produced more than a dozen novels and as many works of non-fiction. This duality of roles is not unknown. Two contemporary examples that come to mind are Jonathan Sumption, who was on the UK Supreme Court and is a medieval historian, and Scott Turow, a Chicago attorney whose works include the trial novel Presumed Innocent (1988). It is, however, still unusual, both in Australia and elsewhere.' 

(Introduction)

(p. 54)
An Interview with Robbie Arnott, single work interview (p. 58)
Preaching to the Converted : An Insipid New Play from Suzie Miller, Diane Stubbings , single work review
— Review of Anna K. Suzie Miller , 2022 single work drama ;

'Australian playwright Suzie Miller, a mainstay of independent stages both in Australia and overseas, is having something of a breakthrough year. Two of Miller’s play are having their mainstage premières – Anna K and RBG, Miller’s ode to American jurist Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Sydney Theatre Company, October–December) – and her Griffin-award-winning play Prima Facie (2019) has been a sell-out smash in London’s West End and broadcast around the world as part of the prestigious NT Live initiative of Britain’s National Theatre. Other productions of Prima Facie, including a season on Broadway and a possible film version, are also in the works, and deservedly so.'(Introduction)

(p. 61)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 9 Apr 2024 16:21:12
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