Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Dan Hogan has won the twentieth Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Dan, who was chosen from an international field of 1,066 entries, received the prize (worth $6,000) at an online ceremony on 23 January, where the other four shortlisted poets – Judith Nangala Crispin, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Meredi Ortega, and Dženana Vucik – also read their poems.

Our judges – Lachlan Brown, Dan Disney, Felicity Plunkett – had this to say about the winning poem, ‘Workarounds’, in their official report, which is available online (as is a podcast of all five poets reading their poems):

‘Workarounds’ remains a stunning critique of the so-called 4^th Industrial Revolution, in a lexicon that could (almost) be the gibberish of a pre-ChatGPT machine attempting to replicate human thought … but not quite. Amid apparent non sequiturs, the heroically outlandish expressiveness, the absurd sleights and puns, there are moments of challenge to those alert to the fact that this poem may be investing in social critique rather than mere post-LangPo fun. ‘Property the essential,’ the text infinitively urges, ‘the cement world is everything a unit of / productivity could want’, Hogan hefting their loaded syntax into defamiliarising lines that are hilarious and sombre, strikingly original, and braided with possibility. In an era of emerging global precarities, this intervention refuses to move quietly into the ranks of alienated labor, instead ironising the ‘refranchise[d] exquisite / doldrums’. Readers are indeed up for some kind of ‘existential kneecapping’. In a maximalist language that is taut, experimental, and has something urgent to say about the Zeitgeist, ‘Workarounds’ worries zanily, darkly, and scrupulously.

Dan Hogan, on learning of their win, told Advances:

I was surprised to bits to learn my poem had won the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Deepest thanks to Australian Book Review, the judges, and those behind the prize. Recognising poetic daring, the Porter Prize is an important prize due to its international scope, and so it is an immense honour to join the prize’s rich lineage of poems and poets.

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A cornerstone of our democracy

Dear Editor,

The world of Australian letters is incestuous. Friends routinely review and promote each other, sullying the critical waters and making it difficult for readers to know what is worth their money and time. Occasionally, this inbred criticism sparks a feud between warring literary clans (see Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s recent Sydney Review of Books piece on The First Time podcast). More often than not, it produces criticism that reads like vanilla ice-cream, sweet and soft.

Kevin Foster’s review of David McBride’s memoir, The Nature of Honour, is anything but vanilla (ABR, January–February 2024). Foster has an opinion of the author and his book, and he prosecutes that opinion. Speaking as a reader, it is informative. Speaking as a reviewer, it is measured. Speaking as an author, it is tough.

I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the Foster review, by the way. What I’m saying is that critical takes such as Foster’s review of McBride’s book are essential points of reference for informed, interrogative reading. 

As for McBride, his social media temper tantrum over the review is juvenile. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why he’s upset about the review; I’ve received bad reviews, too. But here’s the thing: a free and fierce critical culture is, like corruption bodies and whistleblower protections, a cornerstone of our democracy. 

The bottom line is that we can’t have a vigorous literary culture without vigorous critics. That’s why I’m glad that Kevin Foster wrote, and that ABR published, this review. 

Joel Deane

Already it has been a big year for fascists. On Australia Day, a handful of neo-Nazis from across Australia assembled in Sydney. Dwarfed by tens of thousands of protesters at Invasion Day rallies, the fascist stunt still generated the desired confrontation with the state and response from journalists drawn into the spectacle. Two weeks earlier, German investigative journalists published details of a late-2023 meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. At a neo-baroque lakeside hotel, an assortment of old money, political chancers, and neo-fascist intellectuals discussed a proposal for ‘remigration’. Among the retired dentists, bakery franchisers, and parliamentary staffers was Martin Sellner, the one-time, hot-young-Austrian-face of the European identitarian movement – a man so reactionary that even post-Brexit Britain denied him a visa.

In Remigration, a forthcoming book, Sellner fleshes out the masterplan of removing from German-speaking lands those citizens deemed unfit for the national project: ‘the remigration,’ as he puts it, ‘of culturally, economically, politically and religiously unassimilable foreigners’. This ugly euphemism expresses hostility to universal citizenship, perhaps the key continuity between classical and contemporary fascisms, as the Hungarian philosopher G.M. Tamas pointed out more than twenty years ago. Rather than referring to people’s return to the country from which they migrated, as in its sociological usage, this ‘remigration’ included a plan to build a ‘model state’ in northern Africa to receive up to two million deported people.

The recent past is replete with instances of sovereign states doing penance for wrongdoing. The Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations are just three examples that receive extended analysis in Paul Muldoon’s The Penitent State. On Muldoon’s telling, the concept of ‘biopolitics’ is central to explaining why these ‘penitent states’ work so hard to press our physical and emotional buttons, not just our intellectual or cognitive ones. Through institutions of atonement, the state is trying to clear a perceived blockage in perpetrators’ collective emotional system. It is trying to make us cry.

Bernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics. He breaks out of the parliamentary corridors to lumber across an Australia he barely recognises, becoming ever more gigantic and spectral – pursued all the way by a writer trying to wrestle him onto the page.

‘Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.’

Mark Twain

Last year I turned eighty. Vacillating between denial and celebration, I decided, with some trepidation, on the latter. It was thirty years since I had last had a big birthday party: this one needed to be special. I consoled myself that, old as I am, I am still younger than the president of the United States, Mick Jagger, and the pope.

The obvious site was Melbourne’s new Pride Centre, the $25 million building that occupies half a city block on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, a five-storey curvaceous white fantasy with a rooftop view across the Bay. Guests entered through the massive foyer, with its grand staircase that could grace an opera house, and walked into the back hall, where a friend acted as DJ, spinning a series of CDs that reflected half a century of favourite music. No Mick Jagger, but David Bowie, Joan Armatrading, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin – and Mahler both to begin and end the evening.

Friends rallied to help plan the evening. Two of them constructed extraordinary cakes from brownies and fruit, and the evening included a wonderful singer and several speeches. My sister told a story from our past that was new to me, and my two best women friends performed a double act, pointing out that if you needed to find me you just looked for the cutest young man in the room. By chance he was standing next to me at the time.

I expected to feel let down after the party; in fact I felt rejuvenated. But mine is an age where there are more ghosts in the room than actual people, above all that of my long-term partner, who died of lung cancer ten years ago. I am most aware of Anthony when I see changes to the city skyline that he would no longer recognise; there is a gaping construction hole at St Vincents Hospital where he died in intensive care, the sight of which produces a shudder whenever I drive past.

Each year another link to Anthony fades. We lived with five cats over the years we were together, and the last, called CJ after Allison Janney’s character in The West Wing, died while I was in Europe in 2022. When Anthony was ill she would lie on him for hours, purring; now she is buried under a rose bush next to the one in his name. Losing a partner brings both deep grief and trivial problems: suddenly there is too much bread, and turning the mattress alone is a challenge. Anthony was fifteen years younger than me; it felt strangely perverse that he was the one who died.

I am one of a generation of gay men who are survivors, who lived through the fifteen terrible years between the onset of AIDS and the emergence of effective treatments. Those years have hollowed out a community, just as war does, or natural disaster. For three decades, AIDS was the dominant passion of my life, reflected in both community and academic work. I was never a frontline worker, but the struggle to build political support to combat the epidemic took me across the world, from a shanty town in Johannesburg to a helicopter ride over the Swiss Alps in the company of extraordinary activists, scientists, and people living with HIV.

Those awful years should have prepared us for the time when every week someone familiar passes away. One of my earliest AIDS memories is of visiting a former student at Santa Cruz who was in hospital in the last stages of his life. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said bitterly. ‘I haven’t had my life yet.’

Fans of the Iliad have been well served recently. Late last year saw the arrival of a new translation by Emily Wilson, whose earlier translation of the Odyssey (2018) was greeted with near universal acclaim, and it was joined by a new book about Homer and the composition of the Iliad by one of the leading scholars of Greek history, Robin Lane Fox. Both works encourage us to rethink our connections to this epic poem and its value for contemporary life. Set against a backdrop of clashing Greek and Trojan forces, what does this poem about the fatal sequence of events that emerges from a disagreement between two feuding warlords have to teach us?

Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, the bestselling Time of the Magicians (2020), explored the four Germans – Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – who ‘invented modern thought’. The Visionaries keeps to the formula, this time with women in the lead roles. It is described as a group biography, but Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil were very much not a group. Nor is it a biography: there is scant biographical information and no analysis of why they lived as they did. Apart from being born at the same time, writing books, and sharing what Eilenberger calls an ‘honest bafflement that other people live as they do’, the quartet have nothing in common: Arendt was a German Jew escaping the Gestapo; Beauvoir a French intellectual on a mission to enjoy herself; Rand a Russian émigré refashioned as an American neoliberal; and Weil a latter-day Joan of Arc. The closest any of them came to meeting was when Beauvoir, for whom the existence of others was ‘a danger to me’, was introduced to Weil, who had wept at the news of famine in China. It did not go well. The only thing that mattered, Weil announced, was a revolution to feed the world’s starving, to which Beauvoir ‘retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry”, she snapped. Our relations ended right there.’

Hans Kundnani, a British citizen, began working at the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2009. He considered himself a ‘pro-European’ supporter of European integration and regarded the European Union as a force for good. He came to realise that much of what he thought he knew about the EU and its history were self-idealising myths that had been created by the EU about itself. Eurowhiteness: Culture, empire and race in the European project debunks these myths and offers a penetrating analysis of how the EU has evolved.

Here is a joke that used to do the rounds during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A plane was about to land in Belfast. During its descent, the pilot’s voice came over the announcement system: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now approaching Belfast International Airport. Welcome to Ulster. Please set your watches back four hundred years.’

Near the beginning of Wifedom, Anna Funder describes a disappearing trick whereby a male magician conjures away his female assistant. She uses this as a trope for history’s tendency to make women vanish: ‘Where has she gone?’ Funder asks. This invisibility is especially the case in relation to women and war. Not only are women’s roles in wars downplayed or ignored, but women’s writing on war is seldom regarded as ‘war literature’. As Donna Coates, the author of this newly published study, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women’s war fictions, notes, the bookshelves at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra contain numerous books ‘by and about men at war’ and very few examples of women’s war writing. 

In 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee released a volume of reflections on ‘truth, fiction and psychotherapy’ under the title The Good Story. The volume, co-written with Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, preserves the distinctiveness of the viewpoints of the two interlocutors throughout. As we read these exchanges between the writer and the psychotherapist, we are in the realm not of ‘autrebiography’, where the self is endlessly reflected as if in a hall of mirrors, but of autobiography, where the self is transparent to itself and its own viewpoint. What we hear on Coetzee’s side is the plain voice of the author – an author not undone by an army of caveats about truth in the vein of the postmodern, an author who has not departed and been replaced by her readers. This is a voice that engages with Plato’s injunction against the poets in The Republic, a voice that finds value in the artifice of the ‘good story’ even as it acknowledges the failure to tell the story of the good, a voice that ruminates on whether truth as an ethical enterprise might even have disappeared from the psychotherapist’s consulting rooms. In the only mention of this work in the capacious Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee – it occurs in Nick Mulgrew’s chapter ‘Later Criticism and Correspondence’ – this statement is recorded:

What was the best decision Brian Johns ever made?

In 2005, Johns – legendary leader of Penguin Books Australia, publisher of Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, Frank Moorhouse, and so many others, and later managing director of the ABC and SBS – nominated his publication of the Buru Quartet, by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Johns was speaking at an event for Pramoedya’s Indonesian editor and publisher Joesoef Isak, who was receiving the inaugural PEN Keneally Award for publishing. This may have been a case of politeness on Johns’s part, but there are reasons to think this was likely a more considered assessment.

The Buru Quartet of novels represents one of the great achievements of world literature. This would be so if they were written and published in ‘ordinary’ circumstances. On the contrary, composed and released under the most extraordinary conditions, they were the result of startling creativity, idealism, courage, and vision. The Buru novels also hold special significance for Australia, though few Australians have heard of them. They were translated into English by an Australian, Max Lane, who met Pramoedya as an embassy official in Jakarta at the start of the 1980s.¹ Unusually, as Lane relates in his recent account, which I draw on throughout this essay, the novels were initially published into the English language market from Australia, with circulation primarily in Australia and Southeast Asia, via Penguin’s Singapore office.² The novels effectively humanise Indonesia and even help to ‘explain’ this nation, Australia’s close neighbour and the fourth-largest nation in the world by population. They show the creative process by which Indonesia was brought into being and of the visionary leader instrumental in bringing it into being. Finally, these novels, and the story of their publication, reveal much about the nature of colonial power which we, as a colonial or postcolonial society, could learn from if we were not so attuned to listening only to the perspectives of the imperial centre.

It is 1992, the year of the Mabo judgment, and Helen, a scholarship student from Tasmania, is undertaking a PhD at Cambridge, writing a thesis titled ‘Cryptomodernism and Empire’. It is on Joseph Conrad, a writer about whom her peers are contemptuous. Helen is dealing with a forlorn and dismissive supervisor, and the disappointment that her experience abroad was not what she had expected. Her ‘fantasy of vigorous literary talk, multisyllabic and theoretical, was soon defeated’.

Over the past two decades, novelists such as Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, and Ellen van Neerven have produced a body of work that not only unflinchingly explores the reality of Indigenous experience, but in many cases revisions the boundaries of the novel altogether, dissolving the strictures of conventional realism to give shape to Indigenous notions of temporality and relationship with Country.

Sharlene Allsopp’s hugely impressive début novel, The Great Undoing, extends this intellectual and imaginative project in powerful new ways. Set in the near future, it imagines a world transfigured by two innovations. The first, Bloodtalk, is technological. The by-product of a vaccine designed to combat a deadly flu pandemic, Bloodtalk uses genetic markers to identify and track anybody injected with the serum, creating a global system of monitoring and surveillance that allows governments to keep tabs on the movement of much of the world’s population. This has largely eliminated the need for border control – those who are not permitted to enter a country can immediately be identified and expelled. Similarly it has also made almost all transactions effectively invisible: one merely has to climb onto a bus, or walk into a shop or restaurant, and Bloodtalk identifies you and charges your accounts as necessary. But it has also created a world divided into those who live within the Bloodtalk network and the handful of countries and individuals who still exist outside it.

Ida, a secondary school teacher in Melbourne with a four-year-old daughter, Aster, in childcare, lives in a post-Covid world of masks, mindfulness apps, remote learning, and video calls. Recently relocated from New Zealand when her partner, a lecturer in Cultural Studies, is offered a more prestigious job at an Australian university, she has relinquished the possibility of continuing her own academic career. He seems unwilling to share household tasks or help to tend to their child, despite the fact that they are both working, and distances himself by immersing himself in his study and going on long runs. In the opening passage, we are presented with Ida’s childhood memory of being on a beach, where she pretends that she knows how to swim – or rather, that she has learned ‘how not to drown’ – which now seems an apt metaphor for her marriage.

‘The personal is political’ is an axiom that has become ubiquitous. Normally used within the context of feminist activism, in Yumna Kassab’s latest novel – for which it serves as the epigraph – it is a reminder of the human sacrifice of war and how every part of a civilian’s life reflects its surroundings.

Politica manages to be at once specific and incredibly vague. It concerns itself with the lives of ordinary people during times of war and conflict, examining how these political circumstances have ripple effects in everyday lives. In this way, it is very much a book of the moment, as our social media and news feeds are filled with images of despair. What might a day in any of these people’s lives look like? And even if war is not immediately physically present, how is it felt? Yet there is a certain mutedness to Politica. Like Kassab’s previous works – Australiana (2022), The House of Youssef (2019), and the Miles Franklin-nominated The Lovers (2022) – it is ambitious, experimental, and stylised, written in vignettes, aphorisms, fragments, fables, and poems in short chapters. Its structure is rather like a collage or mosaic, with all its various pieces swimming around a thematic core – what the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk has called a ‘constellation novel’.

There is a moment early on in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – think of it as the novel’s opening gambit, the disturbance which sets its plot in motion – when the impish Clarisse McClellan attempts to rouse the book’s stolid and otherwise self-possessed protagonist, Guy Montag, from the partial oblivion in which he lives his life. She shadows him on his walk home from work one evening, verbally prodding him in the hope of puncturing what is evidently less a form of sincere conviction than it is a state of unthinkingness. After Montag rebuffs her questions one time too many, Clarisse finally complains, ‘You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.’

Portfolio

Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment, and Federal Member for Fenner in the ACT. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard. His books include Battlers and Billionaires: The story of inequality in Australia (2013), Randomistas: How radical researchers changed our world (2018), and The Shortest History of Economics (2024). Andrew is a keen triathlete and marathon runner, and hosts a podcast called The Good Life: Andrew Leigh in Conversation, about living a happier, healthier, and more ethical life.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

My ideal trip would be to travel to Kona to race in the Ironman Triathlon World Championships, followed by a hiking and diving holiday with my wife, Gweneth, and our three boys. Like every other family, we’re always battling the temptation of digital screens, so our ideal getaway is a place where we can exercise outdoors and experience a sense of awe.

What’s your idea of hell?

Being inactive for more than twenty-four hours. I’m addicted to engaging in some form of exercise each day.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Patience. So much innovation and progress has come from individuals questioning: ‘Isn’t there a more efficient way to do this?’

What’s your favourite film?

Barbie. Style, substance, and an Australian actor in the lead. Our family relished it.

And your favourite book?

It keeps changing. Last year, it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Among historical figures, I’d love to dine with Seneca, Caravaggio, and Marie Curie. Besides absorbing their insights, it would be an opportunity to caution them about the dangers of Nero, brawling, and radiation, respectively. Just imagine if the world could have got another decade of creativity out of each of them.

Which word do you most dislike?

‘Literally’, because it is literally always used incorrectly.

And which one would you like to see back in public usage?

‘Alacrity’, because of its onomatopoeic qualities.

Who is your favourite author?

I admire Haruki Murakami, who argues that writing and endurance running are complementary. Both require discipline and mental toughness. Murakami notes that running provides a time for solitary reflection, and that by forcing you to find a steady rhythm can inspire the right sense of flow in your writing.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Elizabeth Zott, the chemist who battles against 1950s sexism, as portrayed in Bonnie Garmus’s book Lessons in Chemistry.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Empathy. Fundamentally, I’m persuaded that humans don’t exercise free will – meaning that our actions are determined purely by our genetics and the events that occur in our lives. This means that if we had another person’s genes and environment, we would act as they do. So literature should be about understanding the inner lives of other people.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

My main thesis adviser, Christopher Jencks, wrote a series of books about social policy. I was inspired to become a research economist partly because of the way he looked at problems – driven by curiosity and data, not prejudice and bluster.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

I loved Ernest Hemingway in my twenties, and relished reading The Dangerous Summer while backpacking through Spain. But the violence towards animals and the glorification of machismo don’t do it for me now, particularly given what we know about Hemingway’s treatment of the women in his life.

Do you have a favourite podcast, apart from ABR’s one of course?

If you appreciate depth, the best Australian podcast is The Joe Walker Podcast. Joe’s ability to discuss big intellectual issues with the world’s top scientists, economists, and thinkers is almost without parallel.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

As a full-time parliamentarian, my main focus is on my political responsibilities. Writing has been squeezed into pre-dawn hours and days when my more sensible colleagues are enjoying a well-earned holiday

What qualities do you look for in critics?

The best critics are those who are willing to surprise and challenge their readers. They’re not dogmatic, and they approach each work afresh. This means that they’re willing to praise a good book even if they don’t agree with its ideological framework, and criticise a bad book even if the author’s previous work was a masterpiece. A great critic is also kind – resisting cheap put-downs and sassy asides in favour of trying to appreciate the work.

How do you find working with editors?

When you get corrections from the best editors, you think to yourself, ‘Yes, that’s what I was trying to say, and how I was trying to say it.’ They are willing to recommend major structural changes where the work needs it, while acknowledging the value of retaining an author’s voice. At Black Inc., I have especially enjoyed working with Chris Feik and Kirstie Innes-Will.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

When the panels are well composed, they can be a fun chance to engage with other writers – especially those who produce work in an utterly different genre.

Are artists valued in our society?

Absolutely. Whether it’s Thelma Plum’s velvety voice, Ralph Heimans’s evocative portraits, or Alice Pung’s novelistic depictions of the migrant experience, Australians appreciate the transcendent power of the arts, and the extraordinary people who produce creative work for a living. 

What are you working on now?

The Shortest History of Economics just hit the shelves, so my main focus is on my electoral and parliamentary duties.

With a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’). An interest in the intertwining of memory, embodiment, and visual representation is powerfully realised in ‘Still Life’, in which the memory of a trip to Broken Hill is

Mishearing, David Musgrave’s latest, most experimental poetry collection, arose from deliberately generated ‘mishearings’ of poems he read into Microsoft Word’s 2003 in-built speech recognition software. The software was by default ‘trained’ to a North American accent. Musgrave didn’t reprogram to an Australian accent, held the microphone at changing distances from his mouth, occasionally smothered it, and introduced ambient noise to heighten the software’s mistranscription. He read from the work of various poets, ranging from Dorothea Mackellar to Seamus Heaney, and an extract from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Making multiple readings of the same poem, Musgrave grabbed selected line transcriptions to construct each ‘misheard’ poem.

Well acquainted with Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of anagrams in several poetries, in particular Saturnian verse, Musgrave also created anagrams from the original source titles. So, ‘Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ gets mashed to ‘Cymru Tony’, Judith Wright’s ‘Wildflower Plain’ becomes ‘Low Ripe Windfall’, and Les Murray’s ‘Spring Hail’ becomes ‘Lip Sharing’.

Musgrave explains this process in an opening academic essay, first published in the journal Text. The author draws from theorist–poets such as Louis Zukofsky and the late John Tranter to enunciate the etymology and multiple connotations of phonemes – broadly, distinct units of sound – and homophonic translation and their relation to mistranslation. Through this, he seeks to reveal ‘the probabilistic nature of certain sound patterns’, and address the question: ‘[C]an the phonemic patterning of a poem remain recognisable after homophonic translation effected by imperfect speech recognition?’

So much for what goes in. What comes out at the other end? Some readers may find only baffling strings of phrases that defy comprehension and, often, basic rules of grammar, leaving them confused or just plain bored by the incomprehensibility of it all. Others – likely those with an interest in formally experimental or surrealist poetries, or who are at least prepared to do some homework – will find an assemblage brimming with play and revel in what Michael Sharkey, reviewing Musgrave’s vers libre collection Anatomy of Voice (2016), a forerunner to the present volume, called Musgrave’s ‘learned obliquity’.

To give a taste of what emerges, the lines ‘I was back in an old / rutted cart road’ in Heaney’s ‘To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff’ become, under Musgrave–Microsoft rehashing, ‘Dollars / back in an old market cap right;)’; and lines from Murray’s ‘Spring Hail’ that read ‘and this I picked up and ate till I was filled. // I sat on a log then, listening …’ become ‘When you choose to run / these are still loves to offset the loan industry.’ As Musgrave notes in his essay, there emerges throughout a prevalence of ‘proper nouns and language relating to economic activity in the misheard version, suggestive of some generalised pecuniary anxieties or preoccupations’.

Notable also is how, despite puréed words, lines, and stanza breaks, the original rhythm often survives mistranslation, and assonance, consonance, and slant rhyme endure. The results can be downright funny. W.B. Yeats’s wonderful lines ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ are mistranslated – or, bastardised – as ‘Are things falling into the city? / He cannot hold Munich. / He’s the one that will not be entirely slow, used in every way ...’

Mackellar’s much-parodied paean to colonial Australia, ‘My Country’, gets a new working over, where Mackellar’s lines ‘An opal-hearted country, / A wilful, lavish land’ are comically mangled to ‘Guy is an idler, had a country, / the title country will fall / on average land’.

This virtuosic collection rounds off with a shorter essay on voice and myth. Along with the opening essay, this should provide riches to those valuing immersion in poetics and literary and linguistic theory.

Frustratingly, many source poems go unidentified – the preface implies that Musgrave himself may no longer recall these. Nonetheless, there is plenty to engage with throughout in poems at once anarchic yet circumscribed by Musgrave’s delightfully inventive use of retro technology.

The title poem of Kathryn Lomer’s fourth collection, AfterLife, includes the lines ‘With food for the afterlife, // the loved would live on, / joining the throng of immortals’. A quasi-ekphrastic poem responding to an ancient Egyptian bowl with aquatic decoration, it expands into a profound and nimble meditation on the big stuff of life, death, loss, creation, and the passage of time, without lapsing into sentimentality or overcooked symbolism. The same can be said of this excellent collection as a whole.

AfterLife, Lomer’s fourth poetry collection, is a very different beast from Musgrave’s. While deploying occasional metapoetics and gentle soundings of form, the main undertaking here is to explore connotations of ‘afterlife’, particularly as regards loss triggered by death or, more often, lost love. In the excellent poem ‘The river tells a story’, we’re told, ‘I find metaphors everywhere, of course, / but that’s not why I’ve come’. Subsequently, four teal ducks are ‘unzipping’ the Derwent:

My mind unzips like this whenever I think about you. Which is still too often.

Loss: it sounds like something small and smooth, a pebble, say, to keepin your pocket, a lozenge to hold on your tongue. It isn’t.

The afterlife meshes past, present, and future. It can connote the aftermath of trauma, but also new life. ‘History weighs into the present’, we learn in the opening poem ‘A hummingbird in Italy’, while, in ‘Boy learning the juggle with lemons’, the eponymous boy, who ‘marries three spinning spheres / in a flurry of physics and human adaptation’ will soon be ‘whirling into the future, // down that long unpredictable road, / so many balls in the air’.

The collection is divided into five parts, each named for a key poem within. Ekphrasis operates in many poems – arising variously from contemporary art to ancient museum artefacts in Lomer’s native Tasmania – while science and the natural world offer conceptual and corporeal matter to explore.

Nature invariably interweaves with the personal, provisioning both pain and exhilaration, often simultaneously. We’re told in the simple, poignant poem ‘The glass frog’: ‘I wish I’d known sooner about the glass frog, / that something so transparent and crushable / lives extravagantly in the midst of lush life’. Thus, in AfterLife, Lomer continues the sensual immersion in the natural world found in her previous collections. Yet while nature provides a balm for the griefs and losses conveyed, the poet neatly sidesteps daffy New Age consolation.

Lomer has a clear-sighted and wry appreciation of our place in evolution – as individuals and as a species. ‘What a playful outcome are humans’, she writes in ‘Earthing’. Of musicians in ‘Musicophilia’, the poet asks ‘How did these assemblages of carbon / find things not clearly constructed by evolution.’ Refreshingly droll, the poem continues: ‘I mean, what is music for? / Okay, it’s clear a good song will get you laid – / just ask the Beatles, or Nick Cave – / but is that all?’

Written mostly in free verse with occasional forays into rhyme, AfterLife is an elegant, beautifully cadenced collection that addresses major themes with economy and grace. Its concerns – our modest occupation of time and space, consolation without false comforts – are well summarised in one of the collection’s finest poems, ‘A paean to bones’:

Don’t think evolution has done with us yet.
The book wants me to play a game,
throw a dice to live or die.
I’m already playing it. And I’m not winning.
But the game. The game is really something.

Frank Bongiorno (Adam Spence)

Frank Bongiorno is a historian based at the Australian National University in Canberra. His most recent book, Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia, won the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction, ACT Book of the Year, and the Henry Mayer Book Prize. He is president of the Australian Historical Association and the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Those accustomed to dismissing video games as frivolities may be alarmed to discover that, on a global scale, gaming generates more revenue than the film, music and book industries combined, by an order of magnitude. Games have become the dominant cultural force. We have come a long way since Space Invaders. Despite this prevalence and influence, there is a paucity of writing on gaming. Notable exceptions are Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), now joined by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon’s welcome collection of essays exploring the societal impact of the form.

The photograph arrives while I am reading Dave Witty’s What the Trees See. A tree’s branch close-up, outer brown-red bark peeled back to smooth and brilliant green. A friend, spotting it on Quandamooka Country in Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island, has been understandably stopped in her tracks. Framed intimately like this, its shape and textures suggest warm musculature: lean in, you will be held. This beautiful creature.

Those Roman emperors were a funny lot: Nero with his lyre, Caligula with his speedy horse; Elagabalus with his whoopee cushion (what japes he played on guests who came to dinner!). Mary Beard’s new book spills the tea on all the well-known eccentric autocrats who ruled the Roman world. And what a bunch of oddities they were. Hard to believe that they could have wielded so much power so effectively for so long. Yet Beard’s book is not really about the tittle-tattle. It is, above all, about the idea of Rome’s emperor: that fictitious, hypocritical, and probably accidental conceit by which Octavian/Augustus contrived to be something other than a conventional king. Beard’s answer to the apparent paradox of so many weird mediocrities wielding supreme power is that Roman autocracy was, from its first moment, an act, even a sham. ‘One-man rule’ required a huge supporting, and colluding, cast – from wives and mothers to senators, slaves, and freedmen. Beard explains how the pretence was kept up during its supposedly golden phase: from Actium in 27 bce to Alexander Severus’s murder in 235 ce. Fans of ancient history will certainly enjoy her prose.

Ceremony, hospitality, and image were crucial to the construction of Beard’s Roman emperor. An emperor had to be seen to be believed. But he also had to act like a man of auctoritas (authority). This could mean bestowing generosity, as when grumpy old Tiberius showed afflicted subjects compassion by exempting them from tax dues. But it could equally mean embodying menace. Commodus, for instance, severed the head of an ostrich in order to hold it up in front of senators assembled in the Colosseum. Such darkly comic actions were intended to make important these powerful Romans uneasy. However, a moment like this could just as easily cross the fine line from intimidating to ridiculous. Other emperors who skirted that boundary included Vespasian, who took the edge off his deathbed pathos by boldly declaring ‘I think I am becoming a god’, and Hadrian, who once attracted criticism for ignoring a woman who petitioned him for a favour. ‘Stop being emperor if you don’t have time,’ the angry woman told him. Imperial dignity could so easily turn into its own parody as the more self-aware wearers of the purple must have realised.

The title and subtitle give it away. This edited collection considers two related subjects: the British practice of internment in World War II, and Britons’ experience of internment at the hands of enemy powers in that conflict. The editors define internment as ‘the state of civilian confinement caused by citizenship of a belligerent country’. Thus, the histories this book tells are those of civilian men, women, and children betrayed by nationality and circumstance, as opposed to those of military men captured in conflict. Each of the histories included here is worthy, and some are riveting. There is much in this volume that will be unfamiliar to students of internment and World War II generally.

Marina Kamenev’s Kin begins with a calmly unadorned outline of the nuclear family’s recent fortunes. In the space of just a few pages, she gives a condensed tour of the concept’s history, concluding with US historian Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the nuclear family is a ‘historical fluke’ – one that has, as Kamenev puts it, ‘been idolised long after its use-by date’. The introduction’s mini-tour prefigures, in capsule form, both the book’s thematic emphases and its guiding rhetorical procedures. As Kin’s chapters move through their discussions of the moral panics that accompany non-nuclear family structures, from same-sex parenthood to chosen childlessness to single-parent families, the book reveals that the real moral hazards of reproductive technology lie not in deviations from the nuclear model but in attempts to impose the model where it doesn’t fit.

Slipstream is both a memoir and an essay on migration. It hangs upon the story of one family, who migrated from Yorkshire (where this book was published) to Sydney in 1949. The narrator was their first-born in the new land and, as she tells it, her life has been one of constant oscillation, both emotional and physical, between England and Australia. It is a tale of her parents’ ‘exile’ and her ‘returns’ – to the country she only ever knew in stories, as she was growing up, but which became ingrained in her imagination.

The second edition of Kathryn Kalinak’s modestly titled Film Music: A very short introduction arrives thirteen years after the publication of its predecessor, extending its chronology of film music from the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century to 2022. What makes it unique is the global reach of its documentation of significant events and developments in film music history. This offers a broad coverage from countries and cultures other than Hollywood and the West, and illustrates how practices and ideals vary globally.

Anna Goldsworthy (Alex Frayne)Professor Anna Goldsworthy is Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, and an award-winning pianist, writer, and festival director. She co-founded the Seraphim Trio in 1995. Her books include the memoir Piano Lessons (2009) and a novel, Melting Moments (2020). Anna has directed numerous music festivals, and in April 2024, will direct the Music and Mountains Festival in Queenstown, New Zealand.