Listen to this review as read by its author.

For anyone who has spent substantial time recording Aboriginal cultural traditions in remote areas of Australia with its most senior living knowledge holders, bestselling writer Bruce Pascoe’s view that Aboriginal people were agriculturalists has never rung true. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate – co-authored by veteran Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe – has already been welcomed by Aboriginal academics Hannah McGlade and Victoria Grieve-Williams, who reject Dark Emu’s hypothesis that their ancestors were farmers (like Pascoe himself).

Listen to this story as read by its author.

She’d offered to lay the table (‘Oh no’) or make a salad (‘It’s basically out of a bag’). What she could do, said Amy, was track down That Child, ‘somewhere down the garden. It’s terribly overgrown.’ Borrow my boots if you like, she called at Elizabeth’s departing back.

The child, when found, was in a dead apple tree, not dangerously high, but in a controlled dangling.

‘You better not come any closer,’ said the child, a girl. ‘I might kick you in the head.’

It was a fair assessment of their relative positions. Any closer and Elizabeth’s head would have been in danger.

‘Not on purpose.’

‘Oh, I see. That’s all right then. What are you doing up there?’

‘Looking, really.’ Then, as if adding much-needed clarity, ‘Looking out for things.’

‘Birds? Squirrels?’

‘For an enemy.’

‘An enemy?’

‘Yes. Asyndeton.’

Listen to this story as read by the author.

One interpretation of the facts is that Jean-Michel Houvrée produced his most arresting art only after he had died.

Born in 1694 in Ariège-sur-Mentouin, a village a few kilometres north of Carcassone, to a moderately prosperous inn-owner and his wife, he was brought up a Catholic but embraced Jansenism in his early twenties. He was educated at the local village school until the age of fourteen: an indifferent scholar in the classroom, he was an avid student of the natural world. He was a good boy, obedient to his parents, kind to his friends, open to the loving grace of God. He had big feet, thick black hair, dark brown eyes, a shy smile. Any free time he had after assisting his father in the inn, he would wander the sun-baked lanes and fields carrying cheese and home-baked bread in his bag, beneath a sky colour-washed fresh each day by his Creator.

To Jean-Michel, nature was a thin veil through which the divinity of God could be glimpsed and, if you unfurled your senses, touched. A field of corn stalks rilling in the wind as if stroked by an invisible hand. A ball of maggots frothing in the sunken stomach of a wolf-savaged ewe. Olive tree branches bowing in ceaseless supplication to the breeze. Cloud bellies roasted red by the charcoal-hot earth at dusk. All these things the boy saw, imbibed, and thought upon. And then he began to draw them. But it was not the case that the Creator, his Creator, supported his fleshy hand in Her invisible one and guided his fingers. But nor could it be said that the patterns of expressive and sinuous lines, the deft and sympathetic shadings, were his own renderings of that which he saw in the material world. Instead, it was as if they were copied by him from a master sketch which had already faithfully reproduced their divine and therefore true character, a celestial blueprint to which he alone had access, he alone could see in his spirit’s eye.

His parents came across drawings left lying around. The abandoned well in the field next to the parish church, haunted by the ghosts of those who had used it down the centuries; Francine Moutard, his young cousin, her head to one side, gazing softly, indulgently at the kittens she cuddled in her arms but with the whisper of something else – contempt perhaps – hovering on her lips; the split-second stare over his shoulder of a male osprey – and this time there was an unmistakable superiority in the bird’s black-button glare. An untutored but instant appreciation by his parents of the boy’s gift. The inn served a main road and was busy with those who had occasion to travel in those days: grain and cloth merchants, farmers’ agents, tax collectors, travelling salesmen. His father made enquiries of those who passed through and was given the name of a local painter living in the next town who was getting on in years and might require an apprentice.

The next Monday, a warm wind tugging at their hats and travelling cloaks, Jean-Michel and his father rode over to see the painter. Mathieu Géroux was desperately busy, inundated with orders from the local bourgeoisie for family portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes. But cataracts were crawling slowly over his eyes; his hands and wrists stiffening with arthritis as if made of papier-mâché, drying in the sun. Barely looking at the boy’s drawings, he hired him on the spot to start there and then and Jean-Michel said goodbye to his father and started as the old painter’s assistant.

Mathieu lived and worked alone. The boy slept on blankets in the corner of the old painter’s barn-like studio. When, a couple of years later, Mathieu’s legs became too unsteady to climb stairs, his bed was moved to the studio and Jean-Michel slept on a mattress in the vacated bedroom. The painter kept the boy busy: he rose at dawn, swept the studio, milked the goat, fetched the bread and eggs, and prepared the porridge before the painter arose. During winter, he had to relight the stove in the studio.

At first, he was confined to painting backgrounds: the smoky burgundy backdrop to a portrait of the local bishop, the sunlit benchtop for the still life of summer fruits, the blue undulating hills behind the family scene of Madonna and Child, the commissioner of the painting kneeling in attendance. But as soon as his talent became clear, he was invited to paint the hand-held prayer book, the burnished platter, as well, until, before long, he had gravitated to including the subject of the painting itself, where he demonstrated such an intuitive understanding allied with such technical mastery (the stubble speckling the episcopal jowls; the precisely reticulated thorax of the peach-gorging fruit fly) that Mathieu would stare at the finished work with wonder in his milky eyes. Within a couple of years, without any formal acknowledgement or ceremony, their positions were reversed: Mathieu met the patrons and delivered the finished work of art, but the boy prepared the charcoal outline and executed the most complex and demanding elements of each work, relegating the old painter to those parts of the final picture which the eye passed over without seeing or absorbing.

Word spread of the high quality of work coming from Mathieu Géroux’s studio, although the more informed among his clientele correctly attributed this to Mathieu’s young apprentice rather than to the old painter himself. As the fame of the Géroux studio rippled across the south of France, its products began to change hands for a value in excess of that paid for their creation.

When Mathieu died from consumption nine years after the boy had come to live with him, Jean-Michel, now twenty-four, had become the son the painter never had; if he inherited, under the old painter’s will, his name and property (the cottage across the yard from the studio had been replaced by a double-fronted stone-clad villa with gardens and an orchard), the prosperous business run from the studio was already in effect his. By this time, the household retained a small group of servants, a couple of young women for the kitchen and the house, and an older man for the grounds. Jean-Michel remained unmarried, however. He worked long hours, starting at dawn and continuing long into the night, the oil lamp at the unshuttered studio window a solitary light twinkling in the vast darkness, as though a star had fallen from the heavens and landed in the black folds of earth. But no matter the number of commissions demanding his attention, he walked the countryside for an hour each day whatever the season or weather, welcomed visits from his mother (his father having died shortly after he left home), and each Sunday worshipped at St Pierre’s. If asked, he would have said he was no more than, but also no less than, an involuntary instrument through which the Creator’s presence in each particle (it was too soon to think in terms of atoms) of Her Creation was captured and celebrated. He would not have accepted, or even understood, the romantic idea of an artist as someone who partook of a self-motivated, self-idealised human act of creation.

The old painter had been of the Jansenist persuasion: his Bible never strayed far from a copy of Jansen’s Augustinus. It had been axiomatic to Mathieu that although life was a gift given to all, divine grace must be a gift given to less than all. How many had received the gift of faith he had not been in a position to speculate, but one could not insist on the right to be saved any more than one could insist on possessing the artistic ability of a Jean-Michel. Towards the end of his days, Mathieu had joined a group of parishioners drawn from the better-educated sort who met at one another’s dwellings to read and discuss the New Testament through the prism of Jansenist theology. The meetings were not secret, but they were not advertised, and attendance was by invitation only. Jean-Michel had accompanied him to these meetings, and after the old painter’s death he continued to attend. He spoke less at the gatherings than Mathieu had done but listened more. On the evening when it was his turn to host, one of the young women closed the shutters in the front parlour, drew the curtains, and lit the oil lamps before the guests assembled. Bread, cheese, and wine were served and, once the theological conversation had commenced, the parsing of the Gospel of St John and the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians continued long into the night.

One evening in July 1725, when Jean-Michel was thirty-one, he was returning home from such an evening, held at the château of a wealthy neighbour, a merchant who lived a few kilometres from his house. A warm breeze, spiced with lavender and thyme, stroked the trees and shrubs as his horse followed a track painted luminescent by the moon. The horse had been unsettled from the start, swinging its head from side to side as if to shake off an invisible hand on its head. About thirty minutes into the journey, as Jean-Michel was passing through a stand of oak trees, a colony of bats exploded from the branches above his head and to his right and with a flurry of high-pitched clicks and leathery flaps swept across the path in front of the horse, causing it to snort and rear on its hind legs and throw Jean-Michel to the ground where he hit his head on a tree root. At dawn the following day, noticing the horse had not been stabled the previous evening, the groundsman set off along the path to the merchant’s house. About halfway there, he found Jean-Michel lying unconscious on the ground, barely breathing, a shallow crater of shattered bone and grayish-purple tissue denting the back of his head. There was no sign of his horse.

A cart was fetched, and Jean-Michel laid on blankets in the back and accompanied on his journey home by the groundsman, the physician and his servant, and the cart’s owner, each of whom walked with one hand on the cart to try and steady its juddering progress along the stony ground, to alleviate if only to that small extent the discomfort and physical indignity of the injured painter. When the party reached the house of Jean-Michel, the body was placed in the front parlour and the physician told the assembled servants that the artist was no longer breathing and that he would contact the priest.

So much is agreed history, pieced together from public registries, accounts found in personal diaries, the personal recollections of witnesses, and informed and sympathetic supposition. We can say: this much was known of the life of Jean-Michel Houvrée. What follows is more uncertain: facts are contested, and interpretations disputed.

Eighteenth-century French parochial records are singularly unreliable, but there are no local records of Jean-Michel’s death in 1725. There is no evidence of a funeral service being held around that time, either. Instead, a Monsieur Houvrée (no first name given) is recorded in the annals of the local parish as dying from pneumonia in 1756 (although again there is no record of a requiem mass or other religious service being held to commemorate the death).

In early eighteenth-century France, the keeping of records of commercial transactions was not common; the footprint a moderately wealthy member of the bourgeoisie would leave in local records was inevitably fragmentary. From the scarce records that survived, however, in 1725, it appeared as if Jean-Michel disappeared from the social intercourse of his community: no further record of attendance at church or participation in the Jansenist discussion groups existed; no further record of him purchasing charcoal, vellum, pigments, or varnish from his usual suppliers survived. So far as we know, no further visits were made to the local tailor, physician, or barber, and no requisitions made from his vintner or butcher. Indeed, there is no evidence that anyone ever saw Jean-Michel Houvrée in person again after 20 July 1725. Finally, most tellingly for those who would argue that the painter was seriously physically incapacitated or even died on that date, there are no more entries, whether sketches or text, after that date in those of his notebooks and journals which have come down to us. The last known entry which has survived is dated 18 July 1725, a couple of days before he was thrown from his horse.

Tales which were seed-planted in the mulch of village gossip and speculation took root and over time grew into a popular mythology that formed part of the culture and history of a region, of a country. There are accounts of sketches for portraits only taking place at night, the subject sitting at one end of the studio, illuminated by a phalanx of candles, the rest of the studio in darkness through which a phantom-like, cloaked figure could be intermittently discerned. After an hour or so, the servant who had shown the person to his or her seat would return and see that person out. Commissions were no longer made in person, only in writing by way of letter left at Monsieur Houvrée’s residence; completed works were left in the parlour to be picked up, without meeting or sight of the artist. Of course, it is difficult to know how much credence should be given to such accounts; how much is grounded in fact, how much embellished by imaginative fancy.

The evidence that Jean-Michel survived the consequences of the fall and in a state of health that allowed him to continue working really lies in the extraordinary series of paintings which were produced in the decade or so after 1725 and which are believed to have been produced by him. The so-called peintures étonnantes (Amazing Pictures) constitute a collection of portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and religious pictures which, though ostensibly conventional in theme and execution, contain strange, bizarre, and wondrous objects, elements, and images placed alongside or embedded within the ordinary and quotidian. As one art historian later commented, it is as if the nightmarish, hallucinogenic creatures of the world of Hieronymous Bosch had invaded and taken occupation of the calm, ordered world of Vermeer; what is most striking about the peintures étonnantes is the cool, forensic blending of the fantastical and the formal.

The features of the tax collector in Portrait of Monsieur Fregier are those of a prosperous, humane, middle-aged tax collector, and the painter has captured the weary self-knowledge in his eyes. He has also captured a long, black, sinuous tongue, forked at its tip, lolling from Fregier’s half-open mouth.

In Visit of the Magi, the traditional gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh proffered by the kings have been replaced by a meticulously delineated sleeping bat, a pinkish-grey object veined with red threads about the length of a forearm subsequently identified by veterinary anatomists as a skinned fox, and a nacreous, cloak-like object, draped over two extended arms, seemingly gelatinous in texture, which has appeared to more than one marine biologist to be a dead jellyfish. There is no hint of awareness of the incongruous nature of their offerings in the reverential gaze of the regal visitors.

It is common to include butterflies, wasps, flies, and snails in still lifes of flowers (see, for example, the floral still lifes of the Dutch artist Balthasar van der Ast (1593/94–1657) which are festooned with a veritable cornucopia of insects). But Still Life with a Bowl of Flowers is dominated by a giant beetle, bigger than a human head, drawn in microscopic detail, squatting centre stage in front of the fruit bowl. Interestingly, entomologists have been unable to identify the exact species of beetle in the painting, and expert opinion is divided on whether the artist made a mistake in painting the beetle or conjured its features out of his imagination or whether the beetle was represented accurately but in the intervening years had become extinct.

Perhaps the most famous peinture étonnante is the most unnerving: The Investiture of Dr Regonard, now in the Louvre. Doctor Regonard stands looking out of the canvas at the viewer with a level gaze, resplendent in blue velvet frockcoat, cream linen breeches, and gold buckled shoes, caught in a shaft of cool daylight from windows to his right. Behind him and to his left is a full-length mirror in which the back of the doctor is reflected. He is blocking the light from the window, so the back of his frockcoat and his breeches and stockings are in shadow. But as your eyes adjust to the gloom, there at the bottom of the mirror, on either side of his legs, facing out of the mirror, squats a naked homunculus with eyes like black marbles, pointed nose and wide, lipless mouth, grinning at the viewer, its arms wrapped around the leg nearest to it. In an instant your eyes switch back to Doctor Regonard before the mirror: did you miss them the first time you looked? But no, the imp-like creatures are not there; they can be seen only in the shadows of the reflection, their eyes fixed on you. You look again at the doctor’s face to see whether it betrays any consciousness of these malevolent entities, seen only in the mirror hugging his legs. This time you think you perceive a tightness to the set of his mouth; what seemed like calmness in the eyes now seems like deadness, and you realise there is no animating spark, no twinkle of light deep in these eyes; they are dark tunnels with utter blackness at their end.

The overwhelming consensus currently in place among art historians and scholars is that the peintures étonnantes were indeed painted by Jean-Michel Houvrée. This consensus was first established by the publication in 1882 of Charles Gilliment’s biography of the painter, which argued convincingly that there are continuities of technique, of tint and colouration, even of brush stroke, between the peintures étonnantes and Houvrée’s earlier work that transcend any divergences in style or subject matter. The fact that no sketches or outlines for any of these works of art were found among Jean-Michel’s papers was ignored, as was the fact that entirely different pigments, oils, and varnish were deployed by the artist in these paintings from those used in any of his previous works. (On this last point, it is worth noting that, to this day, art historians who specialise in historical painting techniques and materials have not been able to trace where the pigments and oils used by Houvrée in these works of art were sourced – see Susan Manzer’s masterly survey of this topic in ‘Questions concerning the origins of materials used in the peintures étonnantes of Jean-Michel Houvrée’ from a symposium on Historical Painting Techniques, Materials and Studio Practice held at the University of Neymoller, the Netherlands, 18–20 September 1989.)

It is true that the otherworldly, occult, and extraordinary elements of the peintures étonnantes constitute a radical departure in terms of subject matter from Houvrée’s previous paintings: but they constitute a significant break from most art of that time. It is tempting to exaggerate those facets which speak of a modern, even post-modern, sensibility, or which presuppose an ironic, knowing detachment on his part. But equally, there is no denying that sense of a mind awakened to a new consciousness of the discombobulation to be afforded by the radical reordering of reality and the introduction of images which convey pain and despair just as much as they speak of a deracinated jeu d’esprit.

The appreciation of these striking paintings has been transformed in recent years by the publication in 1999 of Professor Aiden Cumber’s A Fall from Grace: The altered visions and living nightmares of the peintures étonnantes of Jean-Michel Houvrée. His argument is that when Jean-Michel fell from his horse in July 1725, he incurred a traumatic brain injury to his occipital lobe, that part of the brain which is responsible for visual perception and visuospatial coordination. Consequently, the way Houvrée experienced reality visually, and the way he formulated visual representations, was profoundly altered. This accounts for the strange, exotic, or incongruous objects and the disjointed sense of perspective which thereafter are prominent features of his work.

According to Cumber, these ‘altered visions’ (as he termed them) were entirely involuntary in origin and Houvrée had no control over them: once they had formed in his mind, he simply had to incorporate them in his paintings the best way he could. Cumber’s thesis is that this should not be seen as a deficit: the fall did not cause any diminution of Houvrée’s ability as an artist. Rather, it enhanced Jean-Michel’s artistic repertoire and expanded his mental faculties, in the same way mescaline and LSD would do for later generations of artists. This explanation has persuaded some more than others, but whatever the explanation for the radical departure in Jean-Michel’s artistic vision, it clearly did not come without some cost to the painter, as the solitary, reclusive, and shadowy life he adopted after his injury suggests.

Whatever the truth about Jean-Michel Houvrée’s life and art after his fall, we may perhaps give him the last word as expressed in the final work he is believed to have painted. Portrait of the Artist Sitting at a Table is the only self-portrait Jean-Michel Houvrée is believed to have produced. It has been tentatively dated as 1754 when the painter was sixty. An even, limpid light floods the picture. He sits on the left of a round table facing the viewer, dressed in nondescript black clothes, his eyes disconcertingly looking up at something out of the picture, just above the viewer’s head. The eyes are caught at the exact moment they have flicked up, and this has an extraordinary effect on the viewer; the natural response is to involuntarily look up to see what has caught the painter’s eye. Whatever it is delights him; the eyes are suffused with a gentle, joyous humour. The face is expressionless, so this effect is achieved solely by capturing a look in the eyes: a stunning technical accomplishment. His hand rests palm up on the table, as if ready to hold the hand of whoever is going to sit next to him at the table. For the seat on the other side of the table is empty. Except that looking at the way Jean-Michel leans in, the way his hand is held out, more than one viewer has had the curious sensation that there is someone already sitting in the chair next to Jean-Michel, holding his hand, perhaps also looking up at what has caught his eye.

D likes my photograph, the one of me in the 1940s shorts and tight T-shirt, the one I posted to the internet just so that he would see. He watches my story – watches as I make my way through Italian museums, drink Campari, buy a straw hat with a grosgrain band. It is peak summer. It is Italy. It is forty degrees.

I have to tell you: I hold four tenets to be true. I still believe in trains that run on time, in the solemn power of dandelion wishes, that ripe heirloom tomatoes are the embodiment of the sensual life, and that you shouldn’t use people. Hold fast, and the compass will point true north.

It has become a rite of passage for foreign correspondents returning home from a stint in China to pen a memoir recounting their experiences. All too often, the story begins with the said reporter crossing into mainland China at Lo Wu, having just spent time enjoying the bright lights of Hong Kong. Clearly, the Lo Wu railway station holds a certain allure for wandering Australian journalists.

Grumbling about the heat and humidity, the intrepid correspondents take their last few steps towards the border with a degree of trepidation and exhilaration. The old wrought-iron bridge that spans the divide between Lo Wu and Shum Chum is a distance of only about one hundred paces, but many correspondents have described the experience as something akin to landing on a new planet.

The first essay in Christopher Ricks’s Along Heroic Lines is the text of his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, an honorary post he held from 2004 to 2009. He takes as his subject the formal distinction between poetry and prose. If one is going to be a professor of poetry, the least one can do is arrive at a satisfactory definition of one’s object of study. To this end, Ricks summons to the witness stand an august procession of English poets and critics – Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, W.H. Auden, A.C. Bradley – and considers their authoritative pronouncements on the matter, only to arrive at the inconvenient conclusion that a strict line of demarcation is difficult to sustain.

There is something a little impish about using the occasion of his acceptance of such a prestigious post to chip away at the idea that poetry can or should be regarded as inherently superior to other modes of literary expression. Ricks’s aim is certainly not to denigrate the artistry of the poet (no one could accuse him of that), but rather to place the prose writer on a more equal footing. He notes that the finest prose can be every bit as memorable, euphonious, rhythmically precise, and rich in implication as a successful poem. And he makes a point of extending his defence of the prose writer to his own genre: the least glamorous, least loved, least likely to be considered ‘creative’, and most misunderstood genre of them all: literary criticism. ‘What I’d like to know,’ he writes with wry indignation, ‘is why, since Tennyson and I work in the same medium – language, in a word – why it’s always me giving a talk about him and never him giving a talk about me.’

Ricks is one of the world’s leading T.S. Eliot scholars and an old-school close reader. His critical practice is a version of what Eliot called ‘lemon-squeezer’ criticism, which seeks to ‘extract, squeeze, tease, press every drop of meaning’. The essays in Along Heroic Lines are full of finical dissections of phrases and lines of verse. The etymologies of individual words are consulted, buried allusions and connotations are excavated, and multiple shades of meaning are thereby revealed. Even offhand or parenthetical observations and seemingly innocuous linguistic stopgaps do not escape Ricks’s attention, recognising as he does the vulnerabilities that are exposed in those moments when authors feel the need to signal their confidence (‘surely’, ‘of course’) or their uncertainty (‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’).

As a critical method, this exacting approach has some notable virtues. At its best, it is a way of engaging with a piece of writing on its own terms, acknowledging that its technical intricacies generate the aesthetic experience that is an intrinsic part of its meaning. It is a way of honouring the fact that much of the interest and, indeed, the evident delight that Ricks takes in literature is a function of its specificity, its ability to generate that flash of insight, make unexpected connections, skew one’s perspective so that reality appears in a new light.

The flipside of this approach is the wood-for-trees problem. There are invariably multiple levels on which any art work is meaningful. Yes, it can be fascinating to examine the surface of a pointillist painting with a magnifying glass, but at some point it is advisable to step back and take in the whole image. Ricks, perhaps, does not really want an answer to his Tennyson question, but at least part of that answer must be that a studious, thirty-page discussion of Dryden’s use of the heroic triplet (to take but one example) is what is known these days as ‘niche content’. One of the chief problems any critic faces is how to make the analysis that is an essential part of his task live and breathe as an independent piece of writing, how to avoid becoming the tedious person who insists on explaining in minute detail things that are meant be experienced directly. In a manifesto-like passage in which he defines criticism as ‘the art of noticing things that the rest of us may well not have noticed’, Ricks points out that this imperative requires a certain tact, since the critic ‘must neither state nor neglect the obvious. Whether something is obvious may not be obvious.’

Ricks negotiates this problem in Along Heroic Lines with varying degrees of success. He is an excellent noticer who likes nothing more than diving into the innumerable rabbit holes literature presents. The pleasure he takes in the wit of his subjects – a motley assortment that includes Eliot, Byron, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, and Norman Mailer – is reflected in his prose, which is enlivened by his own wordplay and a donnish sense of humour. W.B. Yeats, he notes in a distinctly Johnsonian vein, was ‘particularly anxious … to give credit where credit is due, namely to himself’. An essay on anagrams provides an occasion to observe that ‘Tony Blair MP’ can be rearranged into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’. Elsewhere, Ricks is tickled to recall the obituary of an obscure man of letters, who ‘had several wives, some of them his own’.

For all his playfulness and erudition, Ricks can be an indifferent essayist. When it comes to critical essays, in particular, the devil is not necessarily in the details or the quality of the prose, as such, but in structure and flow. The essays in Along Heroic Lines are full of interesting observations, but they are not light on their feet. They tend to be organised around a theme, rather than pursuing a clear line of argument. They proceed associatively, tracing links and sometimes obscure references, catching literary echoes across centuries. Their details accrue rather than cohere. As a result, they combine an academic fastidiousness with a sprawling quality that makes it hard to imagine anyone who lacks the requisite specialist interest reading them for amusement. There are only so many lemons one can squeeze before one starts to feel the need for a stiff gin and tonic.

To some extent, this is a consequence of the fact that Along Heroic Lines is an odds-and-sods collection of previously published articles, rounded out with only a few new essays. That it is a loose assemblage is suggested by its notional unifying theme, indicated by the title. The ‘heroic line’ was the term favoured by Johnson for the iambic pentameter, which, of course, has an importance in English poetry akin to the dactylic hexameter in ancient Greek and the alexandrine in French. Ricks follows Johnson in preferring the term because it has a less technical air that admits the natural flexibility of the language. Throughout these essays, he makes a point of noticing the recurrence of the heroic line in supposedly unpoetic contexts (Mailer’s jiving prose, the letters of Eliot and Johnson), arguing that ‘it is crucial not to suppose that poetry is a matter of rhythm but prose is not’. The open-ended commitment of the literary critic, in other words, is to the subtle music of language itself, irrespective of genre. The critic’s scholarly and technical knowledge is ultimately a form of aesthetic appreciation, which holds out the possibility of a wider understanding. ‘Criticism,’ Ricks argues, ‘is not a service industry but a service art, one that begins with the asking of crucial questions, a necessary (not a sufficient) condition of seizing crucial answers.’

The biographer Hazel Rowley enjoyed the fact that her green card – permitting her to work in America – classified her as an ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. This is close to perfect: her own biography in a few words. If not exactly an alien, she was usefully and often shrewdly awry in a variety of situations: in the academic world of the 1990s, in tense Parisian literary circles, and in the fraught environment of American race relations. It helped that she was Australian, and a relative outsider. The people she sought information from were less likely to categorise her and more inclined to talk. Her books – the major biographies of Christina Stead (1993) and Richard Wright (2001), Tête-à-tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), and Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage (2010) – are certainly evidence of exceptional ability, as well as obsession and tenacity.

Why ‘burning man’? Because in this immense, obsessive, studiously unkempt work, the biographer brings accelerant to the raging bonfire that is D.H. Lawrence’s reputation and pours it with pyromaniacal glee. Frances Wilson’s new life of the writer stands athwart the accumulated crimes of which Lawrence stands accused – his obstreperousness, his intense and absurd hatreds, his dubious politics, the physical and metaphysical violence he committed against women – and demands a halt to the trial.

If you are looking for the perfect command of voice, Alexander Pope is your poet. It is not just desiccated eighteenth-century rationalists who say this, my Keats-scholar friend Will Christie thinks so too. This is despite the fact that there is zero negative capability in Pope, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. His ironies are precise riddles to be sprung, his judgements instant aphorisms. Pope writes exactly what he means, and it lands exactly on target.

Once, during a teaching exchange in Germany, I found myself learning as much from my students as I was trying to teach them. This is not unusual. Delivering my thoughts to others, and then having them modified during discussions, helps me to understand what I want to say. By the end of the class, I begin to see what I probably should have known from the start.

On this particular occasion, I was teaching essay writing. My students kept insisting that the German tradition was different from mine, an Anglo-American one that says you should assert all your main points early on, and then support them through a careful staging of the argument. In contrast, they had been taught to allow the argument to evolve in the piece itself – to be discovered by the very act of writing. Wasn’t it rather crude to pretend you knew it all at the beginning?

In The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, the photographer–artist Sarah Walker brings into focus ideas about anxiety, control, bodily functions, and the uses of breached boundaries. The essays of this book are personal, and readers of confessional non-fiction will delight in their tone: equal parts jocose and sincere.

They document rites of passage: the first time Walker viewed her vulva in a hand-mirror, pulling the wet lips apart to see them stretch. The first time she held a cock, lithe and twitching. Žižek makes a cameo on shame and its antithesis in comedy. Blistex, Hubba Bubba, and the beep test (used to quantify fitness in children and the military) are pinpoints in the vibrant constellations of her coming-of-age memories. These parts of her story thrum, and nuanced moments of growth and individuation follow. Her mother’s stern, anatomical deep-dives into sexual education: ‘This is the closest that two people can get to each other.’ And the voice in Walker’s head: Surely there must be closer.  

Shakespeare and East Asia is one of the latest titles released in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. Edited by Stanley Wells and Peter Holland, the Oxford University Press series is pitched at the elusive general reader who is seeking a primer on one of the many topics proliferating within the bustling industry of Shakespeare studies. Written by one of the directors of the MIT Global Shakespeares Archive, this book invites readers to think about the significance of Shakespeare’s continuing influence on cultural production in the Far East, and how Asian adaptations of his corpus participate in creating a contested image of Asia for audiences both in the region and in the Anglophone West. Assembling a varied body of cinematic and theatrical reworkings of Shakespeare from countries like Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Joubin tells a story about Asian Shakespeares that is also a story about how a particular region has negotiated the imperatives of globalisation and the tacit anglicising effects of global culture.

Musing upon the art of biography, Virginia Woolf bemoaned the constraints that facts imposed on imagination. It is the most ‘restricted’ of all arts, she wrote, limited by ‘friends, letters and documents’. Yet these very restrictions can inspire creativity. Good biographers don’t just accumulate facts; they give us, in Woolf’s words, ‘the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders’. Biography, done well, Woolf concluded, does ‘more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the greatest’. By this definition, Julia Laite is indeed a superb biographer.

Robin Boyd was that rare thing, an architect more famous for a book than for his buildings.

The Australian Ugliness, first published in 1960, was widely read when it appeared, and for quite some time after – the Penguin editions alone sold nearly 100,000 copies. It was entertaining, satirical, and, with its unwavering judgements, played to the then prevailing yearning for sophistication. Together with Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), it can be seen as a seminal critique of Australia in the 1960s, as the country was groping towards a fuller nationhood. The twenty or so contributors to the present book, After The Australian Ugliness (the ‘After’ is underlined on the front cover), variously assess Boyd’s classic text and take it as a point of departure.

One of the disconcerting aspects of this pandemic is that there was no shortage of warnings. For decades, virologists foresaw the coincidence of urbanisation, human proximity with animals, climate change, and globalisation as ideal conditions for spreading deadly pathogens. Science journalists wrote books with titles such as The Coming Plague (Laurie Garrett) and Spillover (David Quammen), whose conclusions were amplified by TED-talking billionaires. SARS, MERS, Ebola, and swine flu were further clues. Yet come January 2020, authorities worldwide were slow, indecisive, and ill-prepared.

In this sense, Covid-19 has the makings of a classical tragedy: not mere misfortune but a sequence of unheeded prophecies, unknowing collusion with calamity and disorientation when required to act. Niall Ferguson’s Doom and Michael Lewis’s The Premonition – two chronicles of the pandemic likely to dominate bestseller lists for some time – deal with such tragedy in spades. But Ferguson, among the world’s most visible and contentious historians, and Lewis, an unrivalled raconteur of Hollywood-ready financial, sporting, and political intrigue (Moneyball, The Big Short), also deliver well-established tropes and takeaways. Tragedy is neither author’s default genre, which leaves the makings of the pandemic only partially explained.

Doom is offered as a ‘general history of catastrophe’ that situates ‘our disaster’ in ‘proper perspective’. The book achieves both more and less than this. Beginning his career as a financial historian, Ferguson has amassed much attention writing sweeping venerations of British imperialism, Western civilisation, and the American empire. His last book, The Tower and the Square (2017), was an eclectic take on how networks shape human civilisations. Doom widens the canvas to a size both awesome and mind-boggling.

For Ferguson, disasters are often tragedies, prophesied by Cassandras who can neither persuade a sceptical chorus nor save the king from doom. The problem is that humans are bad at comprehending catastrophe. We rebuild cities where an earthquake strikes, as short-termism and forgetfulness blind us to how disaster-prone the world really is. Moreover, he adds, humans obsess over the wrong kind of destruction. Millennialist doomsayers, including today’s ‘prophets of catastrophic climate change’ and cyclical theorists of boom and bust, detract from what makes disasters disastrous: they are unpredictable, complex, and involve mass ‘excess death’, not total obliteration.

Uncertainty and complexity are the recurring themes that make this history ‘general’. Ferguson gallivants from volcano eruptions in ancient Rome, earthquakes in the Wei River Valley and Lisbon, the Black Death and Spanish Flu, famines in Bengal, Ireland, and Russia, the Somme, and, finally, to Covid-19 to make his case. It goes something like this: disasters follow a random statistical distribution but are more frequent than is usually appreciated. The extent of catastrophe is determined by human-made networks that transmit, and then are destroyed by, disaster. As such, even natural disasters are ‘man-made’. Networked catastrophes limit the capacity of modern science to mitigate disasters, but also the blame attributable to any one individual. Finally, there is a ‘fractal geometry of disaster’, whereby smaller mishaps – Titanic, Challenger, Chernobyl – magnify the properties of larger ones, so failures by ‘middle management’ are generally most significant.

This final observation provides Ferguson with his explanation of Covid-19. While networks of air travel and nursing homes spread the virus, and populist leaders blundered, it was incompetent public health bureaucracies that turned risk into calamity.

Doom is broad-brushed, empirically formidable, discipline-defying, and not wholly convincing. The ‘politics’ of catastrophe promised in the subtitle is thinly elaborated, and there are no criteria to distinguish the ‘colossal’ catastrophes that interest Ferguson (why great wars but not colonialism and slavery?). Authored in secluded Montana after Ferguson spent early 2020 jetsetting (and potentially ‘superspreading’), Doom often reads like a series of Boy’s Own-inspired whims threaded together with his favourite themes, written to satisfy his ‘intense preoccupation’ with the pandemic.

That said, it makes for wonderful reading. The scope is breathtaking, as is the handling of the latest in cliodynamics, network theory, and epidemiology. If Ferguson’s aim is to place Covid-19 in the epic panorama of pandemic-like human devastation, Doom is a success. Yet, as is characteristic of Ferguson’s grand, cocksure narratives, there is an agenda. While the author’s downplaying of climate change is maddeningly simplistic, Doom presses for a different perspective on the next unpredictable disaster. In the final pages, Ferguson himself morphs into a Cassandra, suggesting that the pandemic’s biggest fallout will be geopolitical crisis, perhaps of nuclear proportions. While the hapless bureaucratic response to Covid-19 might further illustrate American decline (a topic that has long interested Ferguson), Doom argues the pandemic has weakened both the United States and China, further entrenching their ‘Cold War’, which, Ferguson hopes, will jolt US complacency. Echoing his conclusions from Colossus (2002), Civilisation (2011), and The Great Degeneration (2012), Ferguson envisages the United States resurging as the empire the world still needs, swatting Chinese communists to one side and threats of a surveillance totalitarianism to the other. This is all serious stuff, again prosecuted with a bit too much enthusiasm.

Michael Lewis is not so bombastic. But he does like Cassandras. Where The Big Short spotlighted investors who identified the subprime implosion and made fortunes when no one listened, The Premonition tells of the public-health officials who warned of the pandemic but were ignored by authorities.

In his previous book, The Fifth Risk (2018), Lewis also posed as a Cassandra. That book depicted the vast US bureaucracy as managing the world’s biggest risk portfolio, which is constantly placed under strain as every new White House administration makes presidential appointees replacing the top posts across government. With Donald Trump caring little for that process, Lewis dreaded a meltdown. While Covid-19 was not the disaster Lewis expected, The Premonition is a sequel to The Fifth Risk’s exploration of the consequences of politicising public administration.

The book follows a small cast of experts who, in the early 2000s, rediscovered the efficacy of social distancing in halting the spread of pathogens, before foreseeing Covid-19 hitting the United States and developing testing and genome sequence technologies to beat it. At every turn they are thwarted by public-health authorities and the ‘medical-industrial complex’.

Lewis’s trick in conveying the dramas of contemporary America is finding remarkable characters that personify a moment in unique ways. The star here is Charity Dean, the decisive, razor-sharp public-health official from Santa Barbara who rises from obscurity to advise the Californian governor and White House officials. Dean also bucks Lewis’s penchant for telling stories about hyper-smart, masculinist Masters of the Universe – Tom Wolfe being Lewis’s literary hero.

Yet the institutional villains are the real story, particularly the guarded and cautious Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The once-admired and still-prestigious CDC provides guidance to the US network of local health officials. But in early 2020, discarding advice from Dean and others, the CDC downplayed the threat of the virus, prohibited testing passengers returning from Wuhan, and, once the crisis was upon them, distributed faulty testing kits. Dean was baffled: ‘Why doesn’t the US have the institutions to save itself?’

Unlike Ferguson, who also faults the CDC, Lewis ventures at the end of The Premonition to answer this question. The tale is revelatory. During a novel influenza scare in 1976, the CDC, appreciating the tragedy of having to act, recommended a massive vaccine rollout. But the virus never took off and the vaccine killed fifty people. Old hands say this was when the CDC became more cautious and more closely monitored by the White House. The CDC directorship was converted from a merit-based civil servant to a White House-pleasing presidential appointee. Political expediency replaced civic bravery.

Lewis does not explain that, in the 1980s, Congress also legislated for the CDC to receive private funding, aligning public health with drug companies’ interests. Across the board, budgeting was privileged over expertise and governmental capacity translated into market efficiency. However, these details are not the kind of stories Lewis tells. The Premonition ends with Charity Dean moving from public health into medical consultancy to better leverage the health system. Lewis treats this positively: the United States has the talent, properly utilised, to beat pandemics. Lewis’s heroes are inevitably romantic, not tragic: weary and depleted from American crises, but ultimately vindicated if not stronger.

Meanwhile, one suspects that Niall Ferguson, with his fixation on US decline and heroic revival in the face of Thucydidean danger, is less a Cassandra than a loud voice in a dangerously hawkish chorus.

Amid the daily dramas and momentous impact of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to forget that, just four years ago, Australia was enduring a very different – and much less serious – kind of political crisis. In July 2017, the Australian Greens’ Scott Ludlam resigned from the Senate, having been advised that his failure to renounce his long-dormant New Zealand citizenship meant that he was a dual citizen, and in breach of section 44 of the Constitution. This kicked off a farcical procession of resignations, High Court referrals, by-elections, and countbacks. This ultimately resulted in fifteen MHRs and senators from across the political spectrum being ruled ineligible to sit in the federal parliament.

Where We Swim takes the broad view on each component of its title: the ‘where’, the ‘we’, the ‘swim’. Wellington-based author Ingrid Horrocks explains that her original idea – to record a series of solo swims – was transformed when she realised such deliberate solitary excursions were ‘bracketed moments held deep within lives’ and that their contrivance ‘felt too close to the act of an explorer, or an old-school nature writer’.

Instead, Horrocks was drawn to an approach that ‘challenged narratives about travel (and life) as a great self-directed voyage out, an experiment in the discovery of the self ... Things turned out to be a lot messier.’ She embraced a less literal exploration of swimming, one where her many identities could find expression. The result is engaging and layered.

William Darrah Kelley – a Republican congressman from Philadelphia – stood at the front of a stage in Mobile, Alabama, watching as a group of men pushed and shoved their way through the audience towards him. It was May 1867, Radical Reconstruction was underway, and Southern cities like Mobile were just beginning a revolutionary expansion and contraction of racial equality and democracy. The Reconstruction Acts, passed by Congress that year, granted formerly enslaved men the right to vote and to run for office in the former Confederate states. Northern Republicans streamed into cities across the South in 1867, speaking to both Black and white, to the inspired and hostile – registering Black voters and strengthening the already strong links between African Americans and the party.

a poem is a house into which
words are inserted

permeable, vapour or rain
altering the light outside

a movement before the movement of trees
a lens on those branches

words drop into the street
onto the floor of imagination

a sky contains all this,
the jigsaw

of a baroque painting
things tending outward at angles

held together for a moment
space between the leaves

vivid, darkness
cast down on the earth

a row of books lit up
in shifting reflections

it might be calligraphy
or it might be somebody,

a figure deciphered
from advancing ground

absorbed back into it
a kind of writing

it might be a mud wall
or a window

a day to move into
as the lines advance

carrying the writer along,
shapes of buildings behind trees,

part yellow, part drab green,
denote a suburb

one autumn in another city
where I gathered random notes

to rescue a poem from
the weight of import

When Ishmael escaped from the closed Bible
on the dresser with family names that were

only tangentially yours, you looked to the emergency
site for inclemency and found fire was rapidly

approaching via dire easterlies that actually start from the south
and over the stretch of time just inside a zone sharply

bend west to gather inner heat, saying, I love as much
as your weight of extracted moisture, the soupçons

of winnowings, the haunted maps you foist
on the chart table, showing demarcations and claims,

these accumulations of original sin, these town halls,
these favoured venues for worship, that unholy

rearrangement of desert and salt lakes into surveys
and peggings, into trenches and bores – the resources

of ground-penetrating radar and satellite clusters, the red
blooms waxen and outside the martial governance,

the big-wheeled machinery, the conveyor belts,
a taste of Antarctic melt this far into the ‘permissions’,

into the tapers that set light to your fury, your love
a gesture of protest in floodlit country ignoring you.

1. Yes

When I scooped fists of never-garden dirt into the song-hole,
                I never felt more able.

When these wrists start to ache without pause from the carrying,
                why, I will wrap them in a bandage.

The warmest moment of the inside body caves a little,
                so I cease with its filling.

All collapsings want is a little distraction. All yearnings want
                is a lifelong job.

2. No

The baby won’t be carried in by a bird, and a bird
                can’t carry her out.

Give this refusal the head of a heron and it will have
                its patron saint.

The unlearned part in the play might be winged. Some paces,
                she plunges her beak down.

She will look as if she is hunting through the water’s glass,
                but she is breaking her reflection.

Trigger Warning by Maria Takolander

University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 100 pp

Maria Takolander’s fourth book of poetry, Trigger Warning, is a sharp and arresting collection, fierce in its emotions and determination to make language do the hard work of speaking that which hovers at the edge of articulation. This is a poetics that traces everywhere the lurking presence of the disruptive – in domestic life, in global crises, even in our most intimate experiences. Takolander’s courageous poetry becomes both a landscape in which to inscribe what is unbearable and a sphere in which it might be, at least partially, managed.

Professors Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman are descended from Jews impacted by the Holocaust. No surprise then that in the introductory sentences of this work they remind us that the first people smuggler was probably Moses. Throughout the Jewish year, we study this colossus, who may or may not have existed, as he leads the Hebrews out of Pharaoh’s bondage into the desert toward a promised land. For much of the past two thousand years, Jews have relied on people smugglers as they were shunted from country to country. In Smuggled: An illegal history of journeys to Australia, Balint and Kalman detach the people smuggler from the politicised, malign tropes surrounding this activity and present firsthand accounts from some of those who were smuggled and from the smugglers themselves.

The convict Thomas Brooks was transported to Sydney in 1818. He had been sentenced to seven years but would serve twenty-seven, with stints in some of Australia’s most brutal penal settlements. His life became a cycle of escape attempts, recapture, and punishment. Each grab for freedom made his chains heavier, the floggings ever more severe. Eventually the penal system broke him, his spirit and will to escape crushed. When Brooks was finally released, he went bush, content to live in a humpy, drink, and ponder his past. He wondered how Britain could see fit to abolish slavery and yet maintain the convict system. ‘For our slavery there was no balm. Those who believed in the freedom of men had cast us out; and those who were incapable of reflection must have seen the impassable gulph between the stains of our bondage and the free position of honest liberty.’

How best to tell the history of literature? – a long, chronological survey tracing broad arcs of development, or as a tight focus on a single, transformative year? The dedicated study of a single writer’s life, or the story of a movement, of several writers brought together for a time by some common cause? In recent years, the history of modernist literature has enjoyed these and other treatments. In Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The literary history of a meal (2014), Lucy McDiarmid takes as her subject a single evening: a dinner, held in West Sussex on 18 January 1914, in honour of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and attended by six other poets, including W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. That famous evening serves to focus a wide-ranging discussion of literary friendship and romance, collaboration and rivalry.

In her new book, The Poets of Rapallo, Lauren Arrington instead chooses a place: the picturesque Italian seaside town of Rapallo, ‘nestled in a placid bay on the Ligurian coast’, where in the late 1920s and early 1930s several British, Irish, and American writers and artists lived and holidayed.

In Second Place, the narrator, M, reminisces about the time she invited the artist L to stay on her remote property ‘on the marsh’. Fifteen years earlier in Paris, a painting of L’s on a poster advertising a major retrospective of his art had spoken to M of ‘absolute freedom’. She was then ‘a young mother on the brink of rebellion’. The night before she had allowed a famous writer – ‘an egotist, permanently drunk on his own importance’ – to string her along and then dump her unceremoniously once he decided she wasn’t worth the risk. Viewing L’s paintings in the gallery the next morning, M had felt herself ‘falling out of the frame’ of her own life and ‘became distinct from it’.

‘And what is wrong with sad stories? The world is always sad.’ So advises Little Red, the aged, marginalised, knowing female character in the title story of Tony Birch’s latest short fiction collection. As in Birch’s previous works, Dark as Last Night contains an abundance of sad stories, but with grief and trauma ameliorated by the main protagonist’s affection for at least one other character, be it a family member or neighbour.

All these stories are either set in, or recall, the past (mostly the early 1970s) – a past invariably marked by hardship. We read of tough streets, poverty, kids going without, neighbourhood gangs, and, again and again, the abusive and/or absent father. But we also read of sibling love, resilient mothers and grandmothers, and neighbours, equally impoverished yet resourceful and wise. So ubiquitous are these settings that much of Birch’s impressive oeuvre seems to embody one core story: the tough upbringing.

Hardship, inequality, prejudice, and poverty don’t simply reside in the past, of course – these problems remain, exacerbated by a federal government that provides mining magnates with one-on-one meetings and welfare recipients with Robodebt. Yet even today, our literature often bears witness to an Australia still longing, nostalgically, for Depression-type stories of penury, palpable trauma, and hard-bitten but ‘colourful’ characters, of whom it might be said: they don’t make ’em like that anymore. It’s as if the routines, joys, and grinding boredom of contemporary middle and outer suburbia are insufficient to engage a largely middle-class readership – or, for that matter, authorship. Life in the mortgage belt – of long commutes, reality television, ‘screen time’, and passable home delivery – rarely cuts the mustard.

First Nations people, clearly, have long known, and continue to know, poverty, inequality, and hardship. Through pervading intergenerational trauma, the past inevitably, and necessarily, invests itself in the present. Birch, a First Nations man brought up in Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs before they became hip, has known more than his fair share of trauma, and he brings this experience tellingly to Dark as Last Night. A girl takes refuge from her violent father in the ramshackle home of an ostracised but kindly neighbour (the aforementioned title story); a man must see to the remains of his unloving, and unloved, father (‘Probate’); a child longs despairingly to help set up the annual school Christmas manger, overseen by a priest who has his own motivations (‘The Manger’); a brother and his nurse sister maintain a vigil by their dying grandmother, a member of the Stolen Generations (‘Together’).

Throughout these strong stories, as in Birch’s novels and three previous story collections, we are reminded of the centrality of family. Life is difficult. The father, with all his failings, may be pivotal or peripheral, but women endure, as do sibling allegiances. In the book’s acknowledgments, Birch writes of how three stories – ‘After Life’, ‘Bicycle Thieves’, and ‘Lemonade’ – are dedicated to (and, one might guess, partly based on) his younger brother Wayne, who died in 2018. Each offers a tender portrait of brotherly love. The first and third of these are set in the present day, in the wake of the younger brother’s death, though ‘Lemonade’ poignantly recalls a childhood past, when the narrator believes he once failed his trusting sibling; his regret lingers. ‘Bicycle Thieves’, a tour-de-force portrayal of sibling loyalty and motherly love, is a raw depiction of what might variously be longed for, granted, and taken away. Each of these stories sees one brother protectively, imperfectly, standing by his vulnerable younger brother: doing what must be done, even after death. Aspects of this faltering yet enduring sibling loyalty, invoking an Australia of the past, recalls a classic of half a century earlier: George Johnston’s My Brother Jack.

Sibling allegiance is not, however, only in the realm of men and boys. In ‘Flight’, a touching companion story to ‘Bicycle Thieves’, it’s an older sister who protects her younger brother, intervening physically when a kite he has been gifted (with all its intimations of heaven-bound freedom) is stolen by a neighbourhood gang.

Death looms large in, though doesn’t overwhelm, this collection. Both ‘Probate’ and ‘The Death of Michael McGuire’ feature put-upon narrators reluctantly agreeing to oversee the affairs of no-gooders facing death. The latter story, a mildly comic genre piece, features a petty criminal awaiting his near-certain execution after skimming the profits of a crime syndicate. More soberly but affectingly, in ‘Bobby Moses’ the eponymous character – an Elder and member of the Stolen Generations – visits his home country as he nears the end of his life and strikes up an unlikely but welcome camaraderie with a local police officer.

White authority figures often loom as threat, but are generally more than one-dimensional. In ‘Bobby Moses’ and, to some extent, ‘Dark as Last Night’, individual police officers extend a measure of insight and sympathy. In ‘The Librarian’, the title character proffers physical, emotional, and intellectual refuge to a school student.

These vivid, empathetic realist stories, untouched by postmodernism, make few demands on the reader in regard to style, plot, or character motivation. (As one small example, three pages in, it would be enough to tell us the character is ‘shaking’ without adding ‘with fear’.) Some flirt with twee endings. But they are stories that stay with us: powerful evocations of how the past bears down on the present – in particular, of how women survive, and children carry their experiences into adulthood. As Little Red advises: ‘Women. Children. We carry our stories with us.’

The Tribute begins with a corpse. And not just any corpse. This body is discovered in a Sydney terrace house with its organs removed. One detective describes the crime as ‘butchery’, and that’s an understatement. This murder is the work of Stephen Porter, a deceptively bland chap who uses his bank job to secure the schedules and addresses of victims. These victims are then dissected as ‘tributes’ to the Fabrica, a collection of sixteenth-century anatomy books.

The crimes are investigated by David Murphy, a boozy detective who is haunted by the mysterious death of his father (also a policeman) years earlier. The action gathers pace when Murphy engages his art historian sister, Joanna, to assist in the investigation. Joanna is familiar with the Fabrica, and her employer thinks that her participation in the case will be an excellent bit of knowledge transfer. Murphy also involves his wife, Sylvia, in the hunt for the enigmatic executioner. Suddenly, several lives are in great jeopardy, and the question of who the actual bad guy is becomes unsettlingly opaque.

Bani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in post-‘War on Terror’ Australia. The Other Half of You is an account of Bani’s late teens and early twenties, and of an inner conflict between religious, cultural, and romantic pieties.

In the prologue to her first book, Three Women (2019), a work of non-fiction exploring the structures and expressions of desire, Lisa Taddeo writes that she had not initially intended to focus on women. ‘I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee.’ It was not until she began interviewing her subjects that she noticed that, while the stories of men all seemed to adhere to the same pattern, women’s stories were tantalisingly oblique; when a woman spoke of desiring a man, it was almost never (or never just) the man himself that she wanted. At first, the question that Three Women poses is: Why do these women desire the men that they do? But the further Taddeo delves inside the lives of her case studies (Maggie, the abused teenager; Lina, the woman in a loveless marriage; Sloane, the pariah of her community), the more the question becomes: Why, after everything that men have done to them, do women continue to desire men at all? 

Writers seeking publication are often advised to have an ‘elevator pitch’ ready. These succinct book-hooks are designed to jag a trapped publisher in the wink between a lift door closing and reopening. Has this insane tactic ever actually worked? No idea. But it’s fun to imagine the CEO of Big Sales Books, on their way up to another corner-office day of tallying cricket memoir profits, blindsided by three of the looniest elevator pitches imaginable. A novel narrated by Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles! A faux political memoir about a prime minister and his shark vendetta! An academic satire cum historical mystery mashup told largely through the – wait, wait, wait! – footnotes of a PhD thesis! That CEO will probably take the stairs next time, but kudos to the independent publishers who saw the potential in these experimental works and their début authors. Whatever the path of weird Australian writing, long may it find its way to these pages.

One of my favourite characterisations of the short story comes, unsurprisingly, from Jorge Luis Borges. In a 1982 interview with Fernando Sorrentino, Borges attributes the short story’s strength to its economy; to its muscular form, trimmed of all fat. A three-hundred-page novel, he says, ‘necessarily contains a certain amount of padding, pages whose only purpose is to connect one part of the novel to the other. In a short story, on the other hand, it is possible for everything to be essential, or more or less essential, or – at the very least – to appear to be essential.’ One might say the same about a good anthology: there is no space for filler, no room for error; every story must be essential, or – at the very least – must appear to be essential.

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His most recent publications include the novel Lucida Intervalla (UWA Publishing, 2018), Open Door (UWA Publishing, 2018), and Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.

Which poets have most influenced you?

I was making a list of poets I feel indebted to the other day, and it ended up too long to get a grip on! This list is, believe it or not, selective: Blake, Shelley, Wang Wei, Milton, Judith Wright, Dante, Du Fu, Hardy, Akhmatova, Dickinson, Hart Crane, C. J. Brennan, Philip Sidney, Virgil, Wordsworth, Keats, Langston Hughes, Homer, Li Bai, Whitman, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jack Davis, Randolph Stow, Michael Dransfield, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, J. H. Prynne, Dorothy Hewett, Fay Zwicky, Aimé Césaire – and especially Emily Brontë. I am essentially and necessarily affected by the work of my long-term partner, Tracy Ryan, whose movement between languages has had a profound effect on the way I hear and read poetry.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

These are inseparable ‘qualities’. In fact, the desire to write and the act of writing seem almost fused.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016) and Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018). She was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence and is a 2020–22 Marten Bequest Scholar for Prose. The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021) is her latest novel.

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

Malta. My mum’s side of the family is Maltese, and I’ve been wanting to return as an adult after visiting as a child. I’d like to set a novel there, someday.

Pride of Place describes in detail a selection of the outstanding collection of Australian books, paintings, photographs, and prints that Russell and Mabel Grimwade donated to the University of Melbourne. The main focus is on Russell, but they were clearly a team with shared interests in Australian native trees and plants and the European history of Australia.

Russell Grimwade was born in 1879, less than fifty years after Europeans first settled in what was to become Victoria. His father was one half of the highly successful chemical and drug company Felton and Grimwade, formed in 1867. (The other half was the donor of the bequest that bears his name and which has so enriched the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria.)

The Jolley Prize shortlist

This year we received 1,428 entries for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – the same number submitted last year. Our judges – past winner Gregory Day, Monash University academic Melinda Harvey, and celebrated young exponent of the genre, Elizabeth Tan – have shortlisted three stories: ‘A Fall from Grace’ by John Richards (Queensland); ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’ by Camilla Chaudhary (NSW)’, and ‘There Are No Stars Here, Either’ by Lauren Sarazen (USA/France). The stories appear in this issue. We think you’ll agree it’s a stellar shortlist.

This year’s equal-record field came from thirty-six different countries, a testament to international interest in the Jolley Prize (and ABR). Writers contemplated themes and topics such as the climate crisis, grief, pandemics, internet culture, academia, art, and rural life across a range of genres, from satire to speculative fiction to literary realism – and, in the case of ‘A Fall from Grace’, historical fiction, all too rare in contemporary Australian short fiction.

Here are the judges’ comments on the three feature stories:

‘A Fall from Grace’ is a deliciously enigmatic story, rich in the overtones of the international canon – Balzac, Calvino, Borges. Set in pre-revolutionary rural France, a talented painter’s career receives an unforeseen jolt that simultaneously shadows his life and propels his work from realist proficiency to metaphysical greatness. The story brilliantly elides character with environment, capturing us via a delicately crafted blend of reportage, imagery, and atmosphere. Ultimately, the writer’s own image-making power fuses with the compelling narrative of the painter, giving us the thrill of historical fiction at its most immersive.

In ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’, Elizabeth is godmother to teenaged Julia, but actually it’s Julia’s younger sister, Asha, with whom Elizabeth feels the greater bond. One conversation ignites a peculiar obsession in Elizabeth, awakening her hitherto tepid godmotherly instincts. ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’ is a delightful, nimble story; the characters bristle with life, and the dialogue is crisply rendered. The author deftly prevents Asha’s precocity from sliding into tweeness, and, although it becomes increasingly apparent that Elizabeth is making a little too much of Asha’s ‘seething inner brilliance’, the author depicts Elizabeth’s predicament with warmth, understanding, and humour.

In ‘There Are No Stars Here, Either’, a woman named Caroline travels through Italy while conducting an online relationship with D, a man she met two weeks earlier. This story is written in effervescent sentences that capture the enthusiasm and fickleness of its narrator as well as of her continuous headlong movement. Also captured are the intensities of youthful romance, a state in which the imagination is irrepressible, even when it has little to go on. The story pokes gentle fun at the strange pull of a mediated life over real-world experiences: the pull is strong enough to have Caroline barely taking in the prodigious beauty that surrounds her, such as the paintings of the Italian Renaissance in the Florence galleries or the palaces, piazzas, and canals of Venice.

Please join us on August 10 (6pm) for the Jolley Prize ceremony. The shortlisted authors will introduce and read from their stories. Then we will name the overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500. If you wish to attend, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The shortlist was chosen from our most international longlist to date. The other eleven stories in contention at this level were: ‘What Happened on Djinn Island’ by Shastri Akella (USA); ‘A Dog’s Life’ by Dominic Amerena (Australia/ Greece); ‘The Funeral of Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo’ by Melinda Borysevicz (Italy); ‘The Memorial’ by David Cohen (Queensland); ‘Ghost’ by Daryl Li (Singapore); ‘Furniture’ by Jennifer Mills (SA); ‘Everything Bagel’ by Matthew Pitt (USA); ‘The Annex’ by Anthony Purdy (Canada); ‘Revisionist’ and ‘Sanitas Sanitatis’, both by Liza St James (USA); and ‘Ver Says’ by Laura Elizabeth Woollett (Victoria).

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. We congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted authors.

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Our poetry prize, long named after one of Australia’s greatest poets, is on again for the eighteenth time, with total prize money of $10,000, of which the winner will receive $6,000. The judges this year are the poets Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR), Jaya Savige, and Anders Villani (recently named an ABR Rising Star). Poets have until October 4 to enter. See our website for full details.

Amanda Lohrey

Each month we ask our Open Page subject if artists are valued in our society. Rarely do they say yes. But Amanda Lohrey did in September 2020 (‘Yes, surprisingly so’). Well, Lohrey rose even higher in people’s esteem on July 15 when she won the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel The Labyrinth (Text Publishing). Lohrey, who receives $60,000, has been nominated before: Camille’s Bread (1996) and The Philosopher’s Doll (2005). She is only the second Tasmanian to win the vaunted prize. (Christopher Koch won in 1985, and then again in 1996. Richard Flanagan, oft-shortlisted, has never won it, as we all well know.)

The Labyrinth grapples with questions of guilt, denial, familial relationships, the (de)constructive power of art, and life’s many mazes. Reviewing the book for ABR, Morag Fraser described The Labyrinth as a narrative ‘so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs’.

The ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

Thanks to our loyal and generous Patrons, we’re able to offer our twenty-first ABR Fellowship. This one, worth $10,000, is unthemed. We seek applications from published writers and commentators, however young. The chosen Fellow will, over the course of twelve months, contribute three substantial articles to the magazine. Applications close on September 1, and full details can be found on our website.

Timely, but timeless

Island magazine’s inaugural Nonfiction Prize, worth $3,000, was conceived amid 2020’s pandemic pandemonium, when Covid-19 seemed to be the only subject on people’s minds. Curiously, Anna Spargo-Ryan, one of judges, said that she had ‘expected to reject Covid-19 stories out of hand. I thought we had heard all the stories the pandemic had to tell.’ Nonetheless, Megan Clement’s essay ‘In Quarantine’ was chosen from the 300 or so entries. Spargo-Ryan described the essay as ‘a story about family, human connection and the barriers we will try to smash to be close to the people we love. It’s timely, but it’s timeless, too.’ ‘In Quarantine’ will appear in Island ’s July issue.

Megan Clement, who often writes for ABR, will be back next month with a Letter from Paris.

Information galore

Interested in writing for ABR? If so, register for our free online information session on Thursday, August 12. We’re always looking for new reviewers, with diverse backgrounds and cultural interests. The ABR editors will be on hand to answer your questions and to advise how ABR works with its writers. The session will run for one hour. Numbers aren’t capped, but you will need to register and give us a sense of your interests and experience. To register your interest please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Wednesday, August 11.

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Eileen Chong

Dear Editor,

As the editor of Eileen Chong’s A Thousand Crimson Blooms (UQP, 2021), I became deeply acquainted with the book. As such, I cannot withhold my concern that the charge of a ‘naïvely expressivist approach [that] tends to narrow the emotional and imaginative range of work like Chong’s’ in James Jiang’s review (ABR, July 2021) overlooks important aspects of the book. I believe the key dynamics in Chong’s poetry are dialogic, not expressivist: resistance and connection is how I read them. There is overt resistance to misogyny, racism, and other forms of violence. There is resistance to the grief of childlessness and the silence that meets miscarriage and women’s suffering from it. Resistance of another kind is present in the way that Chong’s lines linger on the physical and sensual textures of daily existence, such as meals eaten with a loved one. This temporal and descriptive slowness re-values such experiences in a manner analogous to certain films (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, say, or Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love). Chong reconnects to the past lives of language and image through her poetry’s engagement with etymology and the history of art. While such an endeavour undeniably walks the knife-edge of repetition (‘self-glossing’) versus renewal, it matters for poetry to remember the lived knowledge of ancestors and elders. The loss would be ours if no one dared to take this risk.

Judith Bishop, Watsonia, Vic.

James Jiang replies:

I think you have misunderstood the intention behind that sentence, which is not to impute this ‘naïvely expressivist approach’ to Eileen Chong herself but to certain readers of hers. That paragraph begins with the critical position that I hoped the following sentences would challenge, or at least complicate: ‘A Thousand Crimson Blooms is written by a poet whose capacity for eloquence might seem to stem from her intimacy with suffering’ [emphasis added]. The ‘naïvely expressivist approach’ is that which equates ‘eloquence’ with ‘suffering’ without any mediation. The point of the quotation that follows in the next sentence is to suggest that Chong pre-empts this mode of reception (Chong does not offer this dry dictum as a key to her own art, but rather uses it with reference to that of her ‘friendly technician’, who makes sculptures of ovaries). In the offending sentence, I had hoped that the phrase ‘like Chong’s’ would clarify the meaning, namely, that I am referring here to a way of reading her work rather than the poet’s own testimony about how she works. The intention was to save Chong’s poetry from one very narrow way of admiring it; there are other reasons for doing so – as I point out at the end of that paragraph and at the end of that section.

Nonetheless, I think it’s clear, however, that we value different sides of Chong’s poetics. Perhaps there’s disappointment that I hadn’t made more of Chong as a poet of ‘resistance’ (as the book’s blurbs invite us to). I imagine that there are plenty of other reviewers who will be more amenable on this front, and I am happy to leave that well-furrowed field to them.

You’ve provided a wonderfully eloquent defence of one way of reading and valuing Chong’s work, but can I suggest that being Chong’s editor might perhaps give this defence less rather than more weight. There’s a Chinese saying, ‘当局者迷,旁观者清’ (dang ju zhe mi, pang guan zhe qing) that roughly translates as: ‘What’s bewildering to those at play is, to the bystanders, clear as day’.