David Brooks (3) (1953–)

The title of this might lead you to expect bunyips – the scary water monsters of Australian lore – to feature. You would be misled. It does include a scattering of atmospheric drawings dating from between 1890 and 1912, but they are the only bunyips on offer. As David Brooks says in his editorial, the issue is filled with things from the backlog 'of pieces too good to reject but refusing any easy categorisation, and the bunyip motif derives, more or less at random, from Michael Sharkey's show more long poem, 'Where the Bunyip Builds it Nest'. (The poem isn't about bunyips, but it is a bit of a monster: a long poem in five parts made up of lines taken from other poems from settlement until now in roughly chronological order, all carefully annotated.)

On reflection, Brooks says, bunyips – nocturnal, haunters of waterholes, 'strange hybrids whose shrill quarrellings can sometimes be heard late into the night' – sound like some poets. So the motif gained legitimacy: the issue contains work by 28 poets, essays on and by a half dozen more, and reviews of seven books of poetry. The online supplement, the Long Paddock, has almost as much again, plus a substantial interview with Laurie Duggan.

The riches on offer include:

Jennifer Maiden's 'The Pearl Roundabout', in which the re-awakened Eleanor Roosevelt continues the conversations with Hillary Clinton begun in the book Pirate Rain

Margaret Bradstock's pre-elegiac 'Ask not'

Julie Maclean's 'cassowary', a North Queensland poem that compresses an awful lot into a small space, about colonisation, tourism, art, and of course the gorgeous, dangerous cassowary

Peter Kirkpatrick's delightfully old-fashioned, even archaic 'The Angels in the House', a meditation on inner city housing in heroic couplets

two poems by Craig Powell: a sonnet named from a line from Seamus Heaney, “and catch the heart off guard”, and a reinterpretation of an anecdote from Freud, 'Fort Da' (Craig Powell also reviews Toby Davidson's edition of Collected Poems by Francis Webb, seizing the occasion to share some poignant memories of Webb).

Southerly is a refereed scholarly journal, and includes scholarly articles. This issue includes Kevin Hart's 'Susannah Without the Cherub', a fascinating discussion of A D Hope's 'The Double Looking Glass'.

There are four short stories, all of which I enjoyed – Matthia Dempsey's 'One Week Gone', about an old man a week after his wife's death, is superb.

No bunyips, not really, but that's not a terrible loss, given what's there instead. show less

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/southerly-731/

Roughly two thirds of this Southerly is devoted to essays that started life as papers for ‘The Political Imagination: Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Poetries’, a conference held in Melbourne in April 2012. So the political imagination under discussion is much more specific than the issue’s title suggests.

Of the theme essays, the clear stand-out is Danijela Kambaskovic’s superbly readable ‘Breaching the social show more contract: the migrant poet and the politics of being apolitical’. When Kambaskovic left Belgrade in the 1990s she had already published poems, translations and criticism in Serbian and was fluent and well read in English. She came to Australia, gained a PhD and eventually began to write poetry again, now in English. The essay addresses the question of her deep reluctance to write about migration, to write poetry from the migration experience. In vivid prose, she lays out her own story and that of others with similar experiences: it’s the story of someone fighting for her own mind, resisting pressure to further her career by commodifying her painful history and at the same time searching for an ethical practice. This essay is worth the price of admission, for itself, and for the way its flesh and heart helps with the preponderantly academic tenor of the other essays.

The rest of the journal is taken up with poetry, short stories and reviews, all interesting, some wonderful. show less

This is a rich, occasionally indigestible, book for those who are familiar with the Ern Malley poems and the hoaxing of Max Harris, editor of the Literary journal Angry Penguins, who published the poems in 1943. The poems were concocted by poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart and submitted to Harris as a demonstration that disjointed nonsense could pass as modernist poetry if it were sufficiently tricked out with literary allusions and sufficiently abrasive or iconoclastic in its disregard show more for established poetic conventions. The Ern Malley Hoax once perpetrated took on an often farcical life of its own. Harris was prosecuted for publishing obscenity. From the beginning, some critics and poets were inclined to the view that McAuley and Stewart wrought far better than they intended and that the Malley poems could stand on their own merits. David Brooks takes the poems very seriously indeed, in a series of close readings, tracing their allusions and their elusive thread of sense that McAuley and Stewart could not entirely eliminate. Indeed, the time has come, he asserts, for an Annotated Ern Malley. This is one of several more books that Brooks proposes to augment the Malley canon. Stylistically, Sons of Clovis has its oddities. When he chooses to do so Brooks can write with clumping lead-booted obscurity. Why he should have chosen to do so is unclear, unless to construct an obstacle course for his reader. Often he will ask this brave follower, 'Have you followed me thus far?' 'Still with me?' Occasionally I felt like someone invited to participate in one of those scams where sceptics are weeded from the audience until only the credulous remain and the doors will close and the fleecing will begin. At page 243 we reach Brooks apotheosis, the celebration of Ern Malley. After speculating that the time may be ripe for an Annotated Ern, he concludes: 'for those who have stuck so bravely with me (and after one last portrait, one last argument) there is the poetry itself, glorious, luxurious,se social, profound.' The full Malley canon does follow in an appendix, though it takes another 60 pages before we get there.

I do not mean to be negative In these remarks. Sons of Clovis can be great fun to read. Brooks is often stimulating and imaginative and occasionally profound on hoaxes, literary authorship and the creation of a literary canon. But you will have to begin with some degree of commitment to Ern Malley and his poetry and a willingness to embrace the idea that nonsense can be transfigured by a hoax. There is, too, the transfiguration of the minor poets, McAuley and Stewart, whose own reputations have been partially eclipsed by that of their creation, Ern Malley. show less

The Spouse has booked himself a balloon flight over the Hunter Valley for our forthcoming holiday. Not me, no thank you, not since I saw one of those things on fire one morning when I was on my way to work. There was a startling glimpse of naked flame through the trees, and then there it was: landed in one of the paddocks near the market gardens, its passengers at a respectful distance from the blazing silks. The operator at 000 thought I was ‘having her on’ when I rang to report show more it…

Still, ballooning is a captivating idea, and I was hooked as soon as I saw the cover of The Umbrella Club by David Brooks. Brooks is the author of The Fern Tattoo which I read when it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2008. It seems he has written another beguiling story in The Umbrella Club.

My first reaction to the puns in the opening paragraph was that UQP’s editors had overlooked a risible spelling mistake on the very first page, where (Private) Axel Glover (in the altogether) is holding ‘a copy of His Majesty’s Enlistment Regulations …discretely over his private parts.’ On reflection, perhaps because I could not believe that an unforgivable error of this magnitude could be made in a passage which must have been read and re-read countless times, I decided that this arresting image signals the ambiguity which characterises Brooks’ style. It was chosen, I thought, to make the reader ponder the meaning of that adjective ‘discrete’, to consider the placement of the Regulations, and to recognise that the sight of Glover in all his glory is one that the narrator cherishes. I still think this is a beaut argument for discrete rather than discreet, even though the homophone trips up the author/editor again on p183 where Edward waits ‘discretely‘ in the shadows and no PoMo mental gymnastics can rescue it.

Discrete or discreet, Axel is an exotic creation and from the outset we can see that Edward is captivated:

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/01/08/the-umbrella-club-by-david-brooks/ show less