y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2023... no. 451 March 2023 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the March issue of ABR. We examine everything from the new National Cultural Policy to Volodymyr Zelensky, Shirley Hazzard, First Nations incarceration, infidelity, exciting new fiction, machines behaving badly, TÁR, the young Robert Menzies, women’s cricket and much more. And while Australia is now set to receive its own Poet Laureate, ABR continues its longstanding commitment to the form, publishing four new poems and reviewing four verse collections.' (Publication summary)

 

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2023 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
A Revival Meeting at the Espy : Labor’s New National Cultural Policy, Jennifer Mills , single work essay

'Welcome to the March issue of ABR. We examine everything from the new National Cultural Policy to Volodymyr Zelensky, Shirley Hazzard, First Nations incarceration, infidelity, exciting new fiction, machines behaving badly, TÁR, the young Robert Menzies, women’s cricket and much more. And while Australia is now set to receive its own Poet Laureate, ABR continues its longstanding commitment to the form, publishing four new poems and reviewing four verse collections.' (Introduction)

 

(p. 8-10)
House and Garden : Examining Menzies’ Early Life and Career, David Murray Horner , single work review
— Review of The Young Menzies 2022 anthology biography ;

'Robert Menzies retired as prime minister more than fifty-three years ago and died in 1978, yet he remains not just a dominant figure in Australian political history but a strong influence on modern political affairs. As Zachary Gorman, editor of this latest book on Menzies, argues, ‘it has become almost a cliché to say that he built or at least shaped and moulded modern Australia’. He created the Liberal Party that has governed Australia for fifty of the past seventy-three years, and modern Liberal politicians still draw on Menzies’ ideals.' (Introduction)

(p. 16-17)
Yearning for the Centre : A Judicious Account of a Vanishing Age, Frances Wilson , single work review
— Review of Shirley Hazzard : A Writing Life Brigitta Olubas , 2022 single work biography ;

'Shirley Hazzard challenged Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen. In her case, she said, poetry made everything happen. It was because she learned Italian as a teenager in order to read Leopardi in the original that she was sent, aged twenty-six, by the United Nations, to Italy, where she wrote ‘Harold’, the story about the awkward young poet that was published in the New Yorker in 1960, after which ‘everything changed’.' (Introduction)

(p. 18, 20)
An Edgy Affair J.M. Coetzee’s ‘especial Form of Dissidence’, Sue Kossew , single work review
— Review of J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture Andrew Gibson , 2022 multi chapter work criticism ;
Anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) will vividly recall the character Alan – annoyingly brash, unethical, self-serving and sexist; one of a new generation of tech-savvy investment consultants. For British academic, literary critic, and writer Andrew Gibson, in this new study of Coetzee, these are among the typical traits of neoliberal individualism that Coetzee’s body of writing resists and critiques. Gibson characterises contemporary global neoliberalism as having led not just to the impoverishment of modern culture but to a lack of planetary care, resulting in climate change, precarity, and depleted resources. The book’s dustjacket brings these issues closer to home; it features an apocalyptic image of the thick orange smoke from the 2019 bushfires at the New South Wales coastal town of – appropriately – Eden. (Gibson was in Australia at this time as a Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in Adelaide.) (Introduction)
(p. 22-23)
No Cause for Optimism : Shifting Allegiances in Eleanor Dark’s Work, Susan Sheridan , single work review
— Review of Middlebrow Modernism : Eleanor Dark's Interwar Fiction Melinda Cooper , 2022 multi chapter work criticism ;
'In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Eleanor Dark (1901–85), which singles her out from the group of women who dominated the Australian literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s, and attends to the literary significance as well as the political and historical contexts of her work. While Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard have been the subject of massive biographies, there have been no major critical studies of their writing. Their contemporaries such as Nettie Palmer, Jean Devanny, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dymphna Cusack have fallen out of sight. But since the publication of Eleanor Dark: A writer’s life by Barbara Brooks in 1998, there has been a steady stream of essays and book chapters, a special issue of the journal Hecate, a second biography, and now a critical monograph on the work of this novelist.' (Introduction)
(p. 24)
The Books That Bolton Made : A Legendary Canberra Bibliophile, Brenda Niall , single work review
— Review of A Maker of Books : Alec Bolton and His Brindabella Press Michael Richards , 2022 single work biography ;

'I hear that those new people have decided to have books in their library,’ remarked Edith Wharton disdainfully. That put-down, from an eminent novelist and book lover who was also a wealthy member of upper-class New York society, was delivered without ambiguity in the 1920s. The ‘new people’ were using books as interior decoration. They would never disturb the display of handsome volumes in their unused library by taking one from the shelf. Could they even read? Probably not, Wharton thought: they had been too busy making money.' (Introduction)

(p. 25)
The Wider Web : A Topical Début Thriller, Laura Woollett , single work review
— Review of Dark Mode Ashley Kalagian Blunt , 2023 single work novel ;

'An early-morning jogger. An alleyway. A young woman’s mutilated body. A set-up familiar enough to warrant its own Television Tropes category (‘Jogger Finds Death’). Yet before catching sight of the latter-day Black Dahlia being pecked at by ibises somewhere off Enmore Road, unlucky passer-by Reagan Carsen is caught in a spider’s web: a simple but effective visual metaphor for the wider web that connects her to the first victim of the fictional ‘Sydney Dahlia’ serial killings.' (Introduction)

(p. 28)
Mysteries and Motivations, Debra Adelaide , single work review
— Review of Marshmallow Victoria Hannan , 2022 single work novel ; Higher Education Kira McPherson , 2023 single work novel ; Little Plum Laura McPhee-Browne , 2023 single work novel ;
(p. 30-31)
Human Constellations : Paul Dalgarno’s Chatty Ghost, Jennifer Mills , single work review
— Review of A Country of Eternal Light Paul Dalgarno , 2023 single work novel ;
'When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify.' (Introduction)
(p. 33)
Jugulating Torrents : Gregory Day’s New Novel, Michael Winkler , single work review
— Review of The Bell of the World Gregory Day , 2023 single work novel ;
'Early in Gregory Day’s new novel, Uncle Ferny reads Such Is Life aloud in a Roman bar. His niece Sarah observes listeners’ ‘confusion, amusement, their disdain, their curiosity, and also their rapture’. A similar range of responses might be manifested by readers of The Bell of the World.' (Introduction)
(p. 35)
Theatre of Memory : Imants Tillers’s Appropriative Art, Sophie Knezic , single work review
— Review of Credo Imants Tillers , 2022 selected work essay ;

'In the early sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance poet and philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived an imaginary structure for universal knowledge named The Theatre of Memory; essentially a classical amphitheatre that inverted the position of spectator and stage, turning the auditorium into a tiered structure that fanned into rows of encyclopedic knowledge. Imants Tillers makes no mention of Camillo’s theatre in his anthology of essays, Credo, but the structure could be a parallel schema for his own expansive project The Book of Power – an ongoing inventory of all the canvas board panels Tillers has painted since 1981, which totalled 102,663 by 2018.' (Introduction)

(p. 39)
Kurraarr Far Countryi"The humpy sits in majestic isolation in ngurrampaa, country", Julie Janson , single work poetry (p. 41)
Tumult and Poise : Sarah Day’s Ninth Poetry Collection, Jennifer Harrison , single work review
— Review of Slack Tide Sarah Day , 2022 selected work poetry ;
'This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. The poems are not overly experimental in terms of lineation, metre, language, or punctuation, and yet freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs, whether this be with landscape, the global pandemic, racism, or science (planetary, oceanographic, microscopic).' (Introduction)
(p. 43-44)
Squares and Rectangles : Shapely Poetry in Three New Volumes, Prithvi Varatharajan , single work review
— Review of Ragged Disclosures Paul Hetherington , 2022 selected work poetry ; Dancing with Stephen Hawking John Foulcher , 2021 selected work poetry ; Carapace Misbah Wolf , 2022 selected work poetry ;
(p. 45-46)
Lapis Lazulii"I couldn’t get there, but looked on from here,", Stephen Edgar , single work poetry (p. 49)
Hawkesburyi"Above the cliff a Brahminy kite circles on an updraught,", Judith Beveridge , single work poetry (p. 49)
Wartime Fates : A Remarkable Snapshot from Dunera, Francesca Sasnaitis , single work review
— Review of Shadowline : The Dunera Diaries of Uwe Radok Uwe Radok , Jacquie Houlden , Seumas Spark , 2022 single work diary ;

'Uwe Radok was born in 1916 in East Prussia to a family of Christian converts who identified as German Protestant. Nevertheless, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Radoks were classified as Jews – their five children Mischlinge, of mixed ancestry. In 1938, the family applied to emigrate to Australia. When their visas finally arrived in August 1939, it was too late.'  (Introduction)

(p. 55)
The Pelican Feederi"Squid-ink sky, so the birds come in:", Damen O'Brien , single work poetry (p. 57)
Publisher of the Month with Barry Scott, single work interview

'Barry Scott is the publisher at Transit Lounge, an independent press he started with fellow librarian Tess Rice in 2005. He has worked in literary programming, been the recipient of an arts management residency in India and a Copyright Agency grant to research small press publishing in the United States. Beginning with an emphasis on writing about other cultures, particularly Asia, Transit Lounge is now focused on publishing an eclectic mix of Australian literary fiction and non-fiction.' (Introduction)

(p. 62)
Prima Facie : The Return of the Griffin Production, Diane Stubbings , single work review
— Review of Prima Facie Suzie Miller , 2019 single work drama ;

'Since first being produced at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019, Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – a legal drama about consent and sexual violence – has become something of a phenomenon. Awarded Griffin Theatre’s playwriting prize in 2018, the subsequent production was enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. A 2022 West End production – propelled by the star power of Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer – garnered international acclaim, the National Theatre’s live screening of the production becoming one of 2022’s highest grossing British films. In 2023, the West End production moves to Broadway, while in Melbourne, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s six-week remounting of the original Griffin production – the production reviewed here – sold out before its first performance. If that wasn’t enough, a screen adaptation of the play is in the works, so too a novel, both helmed by Miller.'  (Introduction)

(p. 65-66)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 9 Apr 2024 15:14:52
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