y separately published work icon Australian Humanities Review periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: AHR
Issue Details: First known date: 2009... no. 47 November 2009 of Australian Humanities Review est. 1996 Australian Humanities Review
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2009 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Orientalism and its Stereotypes, Deborah L. Madsen , single work review
— Review of Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888-1988 Yu Ouyang , 2008 single work criticism ;
Religious Conversion and the Historical Moment, Chris Healy , single work review
— Review of The Lamb Enters the Dreaming : Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World Robert Kenny , 2007 single work biography ;
Extractive Realism, Ross Gibson , single work criticism
'Here is a fine haiku by the Japanese poet Seishi, a twentieth-century master:

The signal pistol
Echoes on the hard surface
Of the swimming pool.
(Blyth 346)

And this tiny gem is by the contemporary Australian writer Robert Gray, matching Seishi for precision even though Gray's poem is fashioned from a much looser part of the world:

Torpid farmland afternoons.
A windmill stirs
as a bubble breaks in buttermilk.
(Gray 'Twenty Poems' 91)

Entire systems of reality are sketched quickly but exactly in these works. Shifts of scale spring from quickly conjured settings. Note all the perspectives offered in each poem, how in an instant your sensibility grabs several vantages on the scenes. Conjunctions of heat and smell and sound all shuttle across your cognitive frame, putting you here and there in a flash, giving you sudden and intense access to realities within the settings that are being witnessed. From the intimacy of your own witnessing body, you span out to encompass sharp details of large places-the hard acoustic slap in a swimming pool that's big enough for tournaments; the almost-imperceptible transpiration across flatland paddocks that need more water than raw nature supplies. And then in the next instant, as the meagre syllables slip along, memories pulse suddenly within you to bring you quickly back close to yourself via past time. All this occurs in a rhythm that folds the larger world and you together unstintingly. Appreciating Seishi's and Gray's crystalline miniatures, you know closeness as well as vastness in a retinue of glimmering moments. Emphasising definitive details of lived experience so exactly, both poems are realist.'

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