The celebrated journalist Peter Arnett’s new autobiography Live from the Battlefield partly solves one mystery for me. For the last eighteen months, whenever I discussed Arnett and his forthcoming memoirs with my husband (who was trying to research Arnett’s relationship with news network CNN after the Gulf War), I found myself constantly and inexplicably analysing Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the characterisation of the ambitious, fragile Becky Sharp.

Now, reading Arnett, I learn that on the ninth day of the Gulf War, when he was visiting the bombed town of Al Dour in Iraq, he found in the wreckage of a home a torn paperback edition of Vanity Fair. It belonged to Raeda Abdul Aziz, a University of Baghdad student who was killed in the raid and who had written on a separate piece of paper, ‘Rebecca Sharp was not a kind, forgiving person. She said all the world treated her badly. But the world treats people as they deserve to be treated. The world is a mirror ...’ Arnett adds, problematically, ‘I took the battered novel back with me as a souvenir, but I did not plan to mention it in my broadcast. I knew I would take a great deal of heat by reporting a controversial bombing of Iraqi civilians in the existing climate of disapproval.’ Such moral withholding is minor here, of course: his objectivity in the Gulf War was usually luminous and impeccable.

With unsentimental compassion and irony, Dispossessed tackles the weighty topic of the rural crisis. In a sense the title of Phillip Hodgins’s verse novella gives too much away, casting a deliberate shadow over all that follows. Yet the manner in which Hodgins spins his yam is constantly engaging.

When Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth appeared in Britain, British feminists asked, ‘where has Naomi Wolf been for the last 20 years?’ The same question might well be asked of John Carroll. His assessment of humanism seems imperiously oblivious to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of the humanist edifice.

Despite the protestations of my close friends I choose to regard myself as a normal person. Only at certain times of the year do I realise how tenuous are my links with the mundane world.

One of these trou­blesome occasions is when I prepare my income tax form.

The image of the woman imprisoned in a tower is recurrent in Dorothy Hewett’s work. In the early poem, ‘Grave Fairytale’, Hewett refashions the figure of Rapunzel to signify the woman poet whose writing depends on isolation and the suppression of her sexuality.

This emblem is problematic for, although choosing her own exile, the woman writer is still imprisoned. Images of entrapment – by family, by desire – proliferate in Hewett’s writing. It is as if the poet is engaged in a battle with precisely those things that sustain her art.

The imprisoned woman also appears in Hewett’s latest collection, Peninsula. In ‘Lines to the Dark Tower’, she is alone ‘blindly spinning / almost out of breath’ and plagued by memories of love. She dreams her death, a transcendent moment during which the soul ‘in the great bowl of the night / is lifted up/and made whole’.

On the 28th ultimo, a warrant under the Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Act, was issued by the Attorney General for the arrest of Noel Jack Counihan pending his deportation to Australia. Description: Age about thirty, height 5ft. 10in., native of Australia, slight build, dark-brown hair, thin features: usually well-dressed in a navy-blue suit; sometimes draws caricature sketches for newspapers; he is a very active member of the Peace and Anti-conscription Council in Wellington, and is also actively associated with the Communist Party. He was recently married to Treasur Edwards, and it is thought that they may endeavour to leave New Zealand.

His extract from the 1940 New Zealand Police Gazette reproduced on the back cover of this splendidly designed biography acts as a striking metaphor for the life and times of Noel Counihan, artist and revolutionary. The subtitle encapsulates the story for, unlike most Australian artists, Counihan was both artist and active political revolutionary and in the story of his life it is impossible to separate the two. In Bernard Smith, art critic and historian, he has found the perfect biographer, both sympathetic to his point of view as an artist and a man but with a comprehensive critical understanding of the limitations and strengths of that ideology. It is a valuable biography illuminating a turbulent time not from the more fashionable viewpoint of the Modernists collected around their patrons, the Reeds of Heide, but from the vantage point of the Marxists and the Realists.

... Be tough
And dream. It's your only chance.
Imagination precedes fact.

Born in Toowoomba in 1924 and serving in the RAAF in the Second World War, David Rowbotham has produced nine books of poems, four of prose (stories, novel, monograph), worked collaboratively on an autobiography while employed at the Brisbane Courier Mail for thirty­two years, partly as the arts editor and partly as founding literary editor.

Somewhere within this idea of things there lurks the soul of a brick veneer, and being a poet in these late capitalist times is like using an hour glass rather than a digital watch ... Look at all these things in this overstuffed city. And out on the perimeters, Neighbourhood Watch saves another VCR!

This dumb belief in immortality. On this side, everyone lives as if there is time to become someone else. Everyone desires a small couvade. And then, at funerals, they all simply act as if someone forgot to turn up.

Couvade? I go to the Concise Oxford, where I find a quaintly phrased word: ‘Primitive people’s custom by which husband feigns illness and is put to bed when his wife lies in.’ Putting aside the assumptions hanging off the word ‘primitive’ here, I pursue ‘lies in’ because (this dumb belief in meaning) I want the dictionary to say what it means. With ‘lies in’ that prim pair, Fowler and Fowler, Oxford’s editors, come closer to the point by mentioning childbirth and lying-in hospitals. Ah yes, lying-in hospitals.