ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received 1,328 poems from thirty-four countries. 

Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Chris Arnold, Dan Disney, Michael Farrell, Anthony Lawrence, and Debbie Lim. Each of their poems is listed below in alphabetical order by author. For the full longlist, click here.

Join us to announce the winner: The 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize award ceremony is at 6pm on January 19. The night will feature the shortlisted poets introducing and reading their poems before a special guest announces the overall winner.

This is a free event but bookings are essential (an access link will be sent out closer to the date). Please RSVP using the email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We look forward to a night of readings and celebrations, and hope to see you there 

Sixes and Sparrows
by Chris Arnold

Mathematics is perfect; reality is subjective. Mathematics is defined; computers are ornery.
Mathematics is logical; people are erratic, capricious, and barely comprehensible.

– Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies

it begins with three libraries, three swamps. one that cut bright segments
from the air. with backs to black powdercoat: a shiver of hand,
turtleneck. with hand in hand under the osprey nest: a guide through dark.
stop and watch the time – this will repeat: a black cat on the em. 

and head up dear, you’re shallow and blind. it begins with mathematics:
questions of whether white is one or zero. crow equals zero: too easy.
make an adder from nand gates, broken alternator belts, sparrows’ feet.
all sums go to zero: distance between black cat and reasons to wake.

a wake: the hours ductile, made of unquiet desolation. wait, we’re getting
ahead of ourselves – it begins with advice. violence. it begins with a radius:
pain, six weeks with a cast left arm. in the aftermath, hagiography:
chorus of meanings / layers of black. a history of threat: face framed in crow.

add another: no saint. case made from metal: for earthing; for capacity
to withstand. thin bleed of warmth: eddy currents under insulation. always
a magic word: helo for email, jfif for picture, stalker for impact. bits missing
in truth tables. braided paper carries weight: force and point for passing skull.

it all boils down to threat: black cat on the keyboard, glass shards,
actor-network theory. inside a skull’s osmotic action, always revenant:
a shade in the substrate. and, of course, the software says black
isn’t black, only zero traced in the shadow / an indecipherable cause.

relax, relax. a six-day panic attack gets you plenty of work.
that, and eye-burning: light the way to fresh-washed skin, cotton;
a black cat on the femurs. is sleep a black cat on consciousness?
how much of that happened? where’s the evidence? is this enough?

again. it begins with email – always does. helo. how do you cope?
it begins with admission: negative zero. a hand at the back of the neck
is either quiet or threat, one or zero. and hand on the wrist, an empty
mantissa. it begins with a library, third swamp, adios florida.

it begins in a hall: old library dusted. you could hang a blue whale
in there; someone has. how much steel suspends a jawbone?
who braids metal cable? and could they braid baleen? it’s a black
leather jacket and the smell you’d know anywhere: the one that creeps

out, spreads everywhere. it begins with accusation: magenta sensation
spread through the flesh: birds of paradise, bison. what kind of life
in a glass case? is there reddening (back to accusation) or a blanch?
bison, birds – taxidermy – the black iron branch: passer, deliciae.

passer: evacuee. it begins with flight from the city, set aside the sparrow
at six. all the stories say never look back: the gods get salty. spend time
in a skinner box: never get sick of beginnings, go back for the kick.
whether the birds are black or white, this one flies from sight.

no. start again. it begins with ativan for dinner, with sleep disruption:
the kicking all it knows for affection. is the black dog a black cat in disguise?
pyjamas? what colour’s its moustache? it begins with friday this time.
with the thickest coffee you can make, black cats’ breakfast,

and head up dear, the rabbit may die. it begins with sorry fourfold,
third swamp’s banks, difficult pills. jfif: dusty pink, black feathers
in her hair. his empty pockets, face drained away. he’s in some hell
or another and no ladder. empty pockets. the thing about time

is its engineering: no space for suicide plans in the jawbone of panic–
good show. who braids the cable? what load can it carry? it begins
with conversation, with revision, with critique. a threading. operations
can be parallelised without common critical sections; with panic

and memory function: the high whine of platters spun to seventy-two hundred,
oxide dropped off – as if dlp6 roped off questions of pad, sparrow, chrysler
spire, night skyline. it begins closer to home: one or zero footprints
on country, black cat dodges the djiti-djiti. it begins where it always has:

splined under railtracks: old dog and what he wouldn’t give for a kick;
a black cat marked the edge / of one of many circles. it begins with fascination:
that which can’t be clawed back. someone’s been hunting: low to the ground,
toes angled for purchase. helo. how do you do time? its ends? and in between

it begins with spilt red wine: magenta sensation in his face. shame –
it begins with secrets: jarrah wood smoke; something unsaid, low walls.
it begins with black cats, never the wine – quarry and moon.
it begins with sunlight in irises, white pullover, thrown rhizomes.

it begins with orphée. the slow descent has begun. adios, yes.

Works referenced

William Basinski, ‘dlp6’, The Disintegration Loops IV (line 54)
Angela Carter, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (lines 2–3)
Catullus, ‘2’ (line 36)
Jorie Graham, ‘The Dream of the Unified Field’ (line 12)
Eric Hamilton, JPEG File Interchange Format (lines 15, 46)
Johann Johannsson, Orphée (lines 37,65)
J Klensin (editor), RFC2821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (lines 15, 25, 60)
Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies
Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (lines 20, 58)
The Twilight Sad, ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’ (lines 5, 45)

_____________

Chris Arnold is a poet and software engineer from Perth, on Whadjuk Noongar country. Chris is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. Chris specialises in electronic literature and information security, and he is the recipient of a Queensland Literary Award for a collaboration with David Thomas Henry Wright. He is the outgoing web editor for Westerly, and his work has appeared in Westerly, Cordite, and ABR’s States of Poetry.

Gippslanding (triptych)
by Dan Disney

>> 
lumpen-proling an outer
suburb gun shop’s counter, he’s off
to Kuta MATE ANY CHANCE
WE GET, drags cadre of city shooters
each Easter to mountains
at Mittagundi, this dozy dozer
cousin hoohahing the moo of his bull
in highest legal calibre, the dog
teams bacchanal-savage
at 4WD thighs of the hero-parodies
waddling back channels, swamped
camo gear over strained paddocks
into nightfall, Fitzgerald’s hut
hypertensively exploding spotlight
whitely into flumed valley enfoldments
as if seeking a mounded crevice
to slide into, or hole in which to set
the key of self, unlocking unreal
plenitudes of being … but, no, this
bullet-spurting panic of flankers
whoops in thou-shalts
across cornerless flatworld terrains
of mind, warbling empty
as prey-birds circling animalities
(their own), berserk, unlost, unmad

>> 
Spring nights, our Landcruiser
crawling Hinnomunjie hills,
our spotlights scanning the fence lines
like a bad god’s crazed intention
unblinking, our rifles
nursed out windows, murmuring
in dogged ½ talk, ‘oi
roo,’ & our scrub-crossing beams
hell-bright, nuzzling the blast
… we are stabbing holes,
terminally, into marsupial lives,
our violence a bland high country
brotherhood’s recreation,
& our term for the joeys in pouches
is ‘dispatch,’ as if horror
will always find euphemism
in the peripheral leaden folds
of a readymade scene, our brutalities
structural, a quiddity snarled
in mutters of WHO
THE FUCK WAS TO KNOW, those
nights depthless with stars
shuddering the aeons, & our disavowals
in blunt grammar
keeping each soulless, static
in a surface tension of inherited wrongs
repeating, freely & by rote

>> 
in thick slabs, Autumn
moonlight ghosts Bogong, the night
impounding the Mitta & our tinnie
bobs the Dartmouth Dam, stars
on black waters as if shoal eyes deeply
whirling, adrift, stricken
by the monochrome formidable
depths we barely intuit, ‘how do you say
whereof we cannot speak, thereof etc.
in Dhudhuroa or Yaithmathang,’
night has been asking, & ‘what
are we taught to think
of beauty without content,’ all night
¼ lit & casting the ether
for Macquarie perch (native,
endangered) & rainbow trout (introduced)
staying mute, steadfastly
silent, struck dumb as inheritance

_____________

Dan Disney’s most recent books are accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press, 2021) and the anthology New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave, 2021). His writing appears in Angelaki, Kenyon Review, Antipodes, Orbis Litterarum, and CounterText, and he is a regular reviewer with World Literature Today. He teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. 

Australianesque
by Michael Farrell

Peter Porter wrote a sonnet sequence about Christopher Brennan
which has never been published. The poem, which he showed me,
during my brief masquerade as Brian Castro, was in a red notebook.
I didn’t feel comfortable being Castro long, although Brian himself
was ok with it: given my work with Melbourne’s HK community
(offering advice on being LGBTQ+ in Australia, providing practice
dating sessions, etc.). The title of the poem was ‘Australianesque’,
which Peter verbally qualified as a working one. He was venturing
(his verb) on the acrostic form, not, à la Gwen Harwood,
with any mischievous intent, yet partly in subtle homage to her
famous stunt. Rather than use, as would be conventional – he felt,
he said, too conventional – Brennan’s or Harwood’s names, he used
the fourteen letters of the coinage, ‘Australianesque’, to start each line.
(Hence his reservation regarding the title, which would give it away.)

The poem – and the notebook itself – seem to have disappeared.
I went through Porter’s archive – and talked to his charming daughter –
when I was being Helen Garner, and had an idea about writing a book
about death as emotional blackmail, tentatively titled ‘The Ultimate’,
that would bring together Ted Hughes, Brennan, and other widowed
writers. My (i.e. Helen’s) publisher was sceptical and the project died
a natural death. By then I was myself again. It’s a funny position
to be in, when my own interests overlap with those of the identities
I assume. I write poems about the quarrels I have with myself (usually
to do with approach or emphasis) like a proper Yeatsian, and wish I
could talk to – or as? – Judith Wright about them. Peter Steele writes
about this notion somewhere; but Peter P never mentioned Yeats to me.
(He seems livelier than W.B.) Perhaps we could compare Yeatsians
and Steinian poets, along the lines of a quarrel with nouns? But not

Here. I remember the poem itself better than others I’ve been shown by
illustrious antecedents, because of the form: e.g. ‘N’ for Ned Kelly.
In the poem, Kelly appears as Brennan’s spiritual ancestor.
Or perhaps rhetorical ancestor is more accurate. Compare Ned’s
The Jerilderie Letter to Brennan’s Musicopoematographoscope and I
think you will see what I mean. It’s a productive convergence
of the desperation to be heard, coupled with an enraged desire to damn
their respective audiences. It’s tempting to wonder what Porter’s
brilliant mind might’ve done with ‘I’ for Indigenous and ‘Q’ for Queer,
but that is to wonder like a person of 2021 or -22. And you can spell
‘Australianesque’ without other key initials – M for Migrant, for
instance, C for Convict, or G for Gold. Porter was, I think, more
interested in the slipperiness of the suffix ‘-esque’ (using ‘Dantesque’
and ‘carnivalesque’ in his poem): its shortfall and excess.

_____________

Michael Farrell’s books include Family Trees and I Love Poetry (both published by Giramondo), the scholarly Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan), and, as editor, Ashbery Mode (TinFish), an Australian tribute to John Ashbery. Born in Bombala, NSW, in 1965, Michael has lived in Melbourne since 1990. Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. 

In the Shadows of Our Heads
by Anthony Lawrence

I’d called the Humane Society to report the neglect
of a neighbour’s dogs. A woman assured me there
would be an investigation, took my details, then asked
if I needed more assistance. I mentioned the flightless

swans of Malta, and she said Imagine, ten thousand years,
then added They were the size of the pygmy elephants
that also roamed the island. To test her liability
to respond in a capering manner, I described the pattern

of my sleep and how, after drinking Akvavit, my cells
become part of the dust of the Horse Head Nebula.
Your astral projection is world class, she said. I could
see a swivel chair, the noise-cancelling headset, a light

blue blouse embroidered with a hook or claw symbol,
the windows of light on her shoes. Are your projections
always so peregrinatory? I’m curious, as I sense I’m far
too fond of the regional. Satisfied, I felt compelled to ask

if Spring, in the mountains, had ever crossed her radar
as a good season and reason for marriage, but chose
instead to invite her for a drink. I don’t date, but we
could drive, as long as you’re partial to Elgar’s

‘Nimrod’, anything by Wagner, and my minder, Karl,
who, depending on his mood, likes to follow at a clip
or respectful distance in his Beamer. I laughed. Alright,
she said, His name is Bob, he’s either a serial tail-gater,

or he moves like a tortoise in his Triumph Mayflower.
On Sunday morning, her music darkening the speakers,
we passed the wreckage of housing estates, then onto
a road lined with trees that cast flickering lines

of light and shade like a view through the arrow-slit
of a zoetrope. We opened the past and found things
worth sharing. As a child she’d been orphaned when,
escaping a forest fire, the family car had come adrift

in smoke and driven off a bridge. She had lost an eye
and her spine had been broken. The monocular vision
and limp had ended her ribbon-floor exercise routine.
When we met, she had approached like someone

leaning into wind. I told her I’d stolen meteor samples
from an observatory on a school excursion. This had led
to frequent stealing, and when I said kleptomania,
I lowered my voice and concluded the confession

with the words illness, serial, and the eight-point-turn
of psychopharmacological. When we stopped for lunch,
I sat across from her by a river whose patchwork surface
she described as snake skins sewn haphazardly together.

I saw the glass eye, and she said Ocular. Three perfect
syllables, then they ruined everything with Prosthesis.
Her hand hovered briefly over mine before moving on.
I said nothing and she took a long time to answer it.

We discussed rescue dogs and how certain bats would
make good pets if only their bites weren’t potentially
lethal, causing fever and delirium. At fifteen, she had
run away to live in a trilogy of Mervyn Peake novels.

I suggested we return via a pub where the Guinness
is collared velvet, the music live. As we stood, the flame
of a kingfisher fluttered on like a pilot light and went out
in the shadows of our heads.

_____________

Anthony Lawrence has published sixteen books of poems, the most recent being Ken (Life Before Man, 2020). His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, and the Blake Poetry Prize. A new book of poems, Ordinary Time, a collaboration with the poet Audrey Molloy, is to be published in 2022. He teaches Creative Writing at Griffith University, Queensland, and lives on Moreton Bay.

Hummingbird Country
by Debbie Lim

My aunt says, never trust a hummingbird. Never trust
   a creature which flies backwards with ease, whose feet
were made useless for walking. My aunt is not a real
     aunt but a cat shaped like a woman. She runs her claws

across the ceiling and drags my heart from room to room
   in a grey ribbed mouth. She stalks in gardens. Steals all
the hummingbird feeders. Later I hear their glass bones
      jittering apart in the sack when she kisses them

with a hammer. My aunt says never trust an animal
   that is armless like god – in each eye sits a minute camera.
She gouges out each flowering bush by the house,
     installs heavy velvet blackout curtains.

Bad days she binds me to the chair. I practise violet
   palpitations and miniature thoughts, teach my fingers
to flutter so fast you can’t see them. I wear skin brooches:
     tender blues, green. She hasn’t noticed I am mastering

the art of iridescence. Evenings, I collect slugs and grind them
   to a paste. Gather lichens, compare the tensile
strength of different kinds of spiders’ silk. In my head I hone
     a delegation of moons. My tongue lengthens

and grooves. Under darkness I rehearse the languages
   they will speak in the new country: Snowcap, Emerald,
Hermit, Bee … When she comes in at night to check my breath,
     I sink deep into torpor. I am learning to sleep

like the dead in a thimble of moss. Each morning on waking 
  I perform fresh wingbeats in bed. Marvel at how
small I’ve become. Tomorrow break of day, I will be
     glint of raindrop. Genuflection of light. Rotation of air –

afterwards she will lift back the sheet and find nothing
   but a tiny pair of dropped arms.

_____________

Note: This poem draws on a line from Norman Dubie’s poem ‘Hummingbirds’: They will be without arms like god. Snowcap, Emerald, Hermit and Bee are varieties of hummingbirds.

Debbie Lim’s poems have appeared regularly in the Best Australian Poems series and in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, among other anthologies. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Meanjin, Westerly, Overland, Mascara Literary Review, and Island. She has received the ArtsACT Rosemary Dobson Award. Her chapbook, Beastly Eye, was published by Vagabond Press, and she is working on a full-length collection. She lives in Sydney.

The first two volumes of Helen Garner’s diaries – Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020) – cover eight years apiece. This one covers three. It is an intense, even claustrophobic story of the breakup of a marriage – a story told in the incidental, fragmentary form of a diary.

In an earlier volume, Garner wrote: ‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other.’ And, ‘Later, a dream: some kind of dark, dumb attraction between V and me.’ Now here it is: a story of the struggles between people who love each other, and their slow waking out of it. How to End a Story starts just after the publication of Garner’s book The First Stone (1995), a book that she started writing at about the time that she started on the relationship with V. A lot of the entries in How to End a Story reflect, one way or another, on ‘the trouble between women and men’. Even seemingly digressive parts of the diary reflect back on the question. She and a friend visit the new Armani store: they compare its clothes for women with its clothes for men. They prefer the latter. She is told that her haircut is ‘too short’; she calls it ‘blokeish’. Her daughter gets married; she remembers how her father thwarted her first wedding. She visits her parents: when her father leaves the room, he turns out the light, leaving his wife and daughter in the dark. She and V pass a couple fighting in the street. Passing that place the next day, V says, ‘I wonder what happened to that bloke.’ She quotes Proust on jealousy; Richard Ford from Women with Men.

Letter writing thrives on distance. Out of necessity, in the early years of European settlement, Australia became a nation of letter writers. The remoteness of the island continent gave the letter a special importance. Even those unused to writing had so much to say, and such a strong need to hear from home, that the laborious business of pen and ink and the struggles with spelling were overcome. Early letters reflected the homesickness of settlers as well as their sense of achievement and their need to hold on to a former life. It’s possible to see the emergence of a democratic tradition of letter writing in those needful times. Rich or poor, well educated or semi-literate, they all felt the urge to connect.

It was one of the most notorious episodes in the annals of Australian publishing. In September 1993, writing in Quadrant, Peter Ryan, the former director of Melbourne University Press (1962–87), publicly disowned Manning Clark’s six-volume A History of Australia. Clark had been dead for barely sixteen months. For scandalous copy and gossip-laden controversy, there was nothing to equal it, particularly when Ryan’s bombshell was dropped into a culture that was already polarised after more than a decade of the History Wars.

One month before Ryan’s blistering attack, Quadrant, edited by Robert Manne, ran Geoffrey Blainey’s essay ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of our History’, in which the wily historian identified his former teacher Manning Clark as one of the chief architects of what Blainey labelled the ‘Black Armband’ view of Australian history. Now, in his essay and others that followed, Ryan chimed in with more vindictive intent, describing Clark’s work as ‘gooey, subjective pap ... a vast cauldron of very thin verbal soup’. He mocked Clark’s literary style as ‘bad to the point of embarrassment’, and cast his entire multi-volume history as little more than ‘a construct spun from fairy floss ... a fraud’. And this from a publisher who, when Clark was alive, had lavished him with nothing but fawning, unadulterated praise. Ryan had inherited Clark’s project, then shepherded and cajoled him to complete each successive volume, from Volume Two in 1968 through to the publication of Volume Six in 1987.

In early 1961, historian Edward Hallett Carr (1892–1982) delivered a series of lectures on his craft. The resulting book, What Is History?, was a provocation to his peers and a caution against positivist views of the past. He urged the reader to ‘study the historian before you begin to study the facts’. He illuminated the subjectivities of the historical process, from the moment a ‘fact’ occurs to when it is called as such, through the endurances and erasures of archival selection to the silences created by the historian’s narrative choices. The most famous passages are Carr’s maritime metaphors, in which he likens ‘facts’ to ‘fish swimming in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean’. What the historian will catch depends on the kind of facts she wants, and once they reach the fishmonger’s slab, she will cook and serve them ‘in whatever style appeals’. ‘History,’ Carr concluded, ‘means interpretation.’

We know exactly when the first image of a Roman emperor arrived in Australia. It came as part of the goods on board the ill-fated Batavia, which ran aground off the west coast of Australia on 4 June 1629. This shipwreck went down in infamy following the mutiny of a group of the survivors and the subsequent murder of, at least, 110 men, women, and children. Eventually, the survivors were rescued and the horror of the actions of the mutineers was revealed.

In ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul … giving life and motion to the whole body’. This ‘Artificiall man’ was to ensure ‘the peoples safety’, and the means at its disposal were limitless. The sovereign was ‘not subject to the Civill Lawes’ and could abrogate any ‘Lawes that trouble him’. Leviathan was published in 1651, written by Hobbes while exiled in France after fleeing the English Civil Wars. The Wars had already produced almost 200,000 deaths, including that of Charles I, beheaded in 1649 following a conviction of treason by Parliament.

The Trump presidency (2017–21) has generated more books across its four years than most presidencies have across eight. It is ironic that an avowedly anti-intellectual president, who advertises his dislike of reading, has had such a profound impact on political literature. These two books – Landslide and Peril – will likely remain the most read of that growing collection. As their titles suggest, each is a chronicle of the chaos that consumed the United States during and after the 2020 election campaign.

Both recount the bizarre close to one of the most unexpected presidencies in American history. Both exploit high-level access to the people who surrounded Trump as he was dragged from office in the three months following his November election defeat. Both reconstruct the violent assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, two weeks before Joe Biden was sworn in. Both offer compelling narratives of this northern winter of peril.

The Nile runs straight through the middle of Cairo, from south to north like a grand zip. In the middle of this citied stretch of river there is an island known colloquially by the name of the suburb that crowds it: Zamalek. Once the grounds of a summer palace, the island became a colonial stronghold in the 1880s, when an extravagant leisure club was built for British Army officers, replete with croquet lawns, a polo field, and pony stables. Now, Zamalek is a restless mix of affluence and decay: home to old money, new expatriates, and crumbling art-deco apartment blocks – the last gasp of Nasser-era rent control. Embassy gardens thrive behind concrete walls and razor wire, while national service recruits doze in the heat, chins propped on the barrels of their AK-47s. American fast-food chains rub greasy shoulders with antique stores full of French rococo and faux-Napoleonic gilt. The ponies outlasted the British Empire, and can still be booked for riding lessons, but the summer palace has been swallowed by a Marriott Hotel. And on the busiest street of this well-storied isle – where the everyday traffic is as loud as a rock concert – there is a bookshop.

I stumbled across Diwan on my first night in Cairo, and for the two years I called Zamalek home, I lived a short walk away from its grand glass doors. The store was the centre of my mental map, a pocket of alphabetised calm in the city’s ever-roiling chaos – so ferociously air conditioned my glasses would fog. It was the place I’d arrange to meet new friends so we could browse our way to conversation, and where I would go to people-watch on lonely nights (lurking in the divide between the Arabic and English language books was the rarest of Cairo commodities, a non-smoking café). The store was the landmark overseas visitors would use to trace their way back to me, or – more often than not – the place they’d get lost along the way, returning with far too much literary luggage.

The booksellers of Diwan filled my hands with stories of Cairo – raw-hearted, past-bound el-Qahira – and those stories helped me to understand my transitory place within it. I left Australia with two boxes of books; I sent home more than a dozen. But I never said goodbye. I left Egypt as the pandemic hit – a rush of packed bags amid rumours of airport closures. I intended to return. Now, with those intentions scuttled, it is a quiet delight to be able to revisit my favourite Zamalek haunt in Nadia Wassef’s bittersweet memoir, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller. ‘Diwan isn’t a business,’ Wassef writes. ‘She’s a person, and this is her story.’

Wassef founded Diwan in 2002, alongside her sister Hind and their friend Nihal Schawky: three women with a wildly hopeful vision for Egypt’s literary future. ‘We launched Diwan in a culture that had stopped reading,’ Wassef explains. ‘Education had emphasised rote memorisation and discouraged freedom of thought. Readers were alienated at every turn ... literature died many successive slow and bureaucratic deaths.’ The country was entering its third decade under Hosni Mubarak’s listless, censorious leadership, and national illiteracy levels were at a record high. Egypt’s publishing infrastructure had largely crumbled, and state-printed books were flimsy creatures, stapled together like pamphlets (and largely propagandist). Bookshops, Wassef recalls, were either government-run, glorified newsagents, or ‘tomb-like’ places where the books desiccated on the shelves. ‘Starting a bookshop at this moment of cultural atrophy seemed impossible and utterly necessary.’

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is the story of what happens when dauntless optimism collides with bureaucratic torpor – a tale of shake-ups and shakedowns. ‘We had no business plan, no warehouse, and no fear,’ Wassef writes of herself and her co-founders. Dismissed as ‘bourgeois housewives wasting our time and money’, the trio would go on to open sixteen Diwan outlets (and close six) – not bad for novice businesswomen in a notoriously corrupt and ferociously patriarchal autocracy.

There’s a long and mighty history of female entrepreneurship in Egypt, Wassef argues – it’s just unsung, a history of erasure. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is a potent rejoinder, but it’s not a jaunty girlboss manifesto, some kind of Cairene Lean In. Wassef is writing from London, where she relocated after the military intervention that brought to power General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi: Donald Trump’s ‘favourite dictator’. Her memoir elegises pre-revolution Cairo, those new-millennium years of reformist idealism in the lead-up to January 2011. It was a time that shimmered with possibility; if not a cultural renaissance, then the promise of one. By the time I arrived in Cairo in early 2018, that shimmer had long proved to be a mirage. The city was a hard knot of grief.

Diwan’s flagship was the Zamalek store, which opened on the former site of a men’s gym (‘I savoured the irony of our female-owned-and-operated bookstore replacing that temple of masculinity’). Wassef was the store’s English-language book buyer. Rather than a dutiful chronology, she gives us a reading experience akin to browsing. We wander from one section of the store to another – classics, parenting, art and design – each a prompt for reflection, personal and political. ‘Diwan, and Egypt, changed around me,’ the former bookseller writes. ‘As always, my shelves offered me an unexpected education on these changes.’

There are the Jamie Oliver ‘Naked Chef’ cookbooks that land Wassef in strife with the Egyptian censors (‘Little did I know then how much angst this particular chef’s metaphoric nudity would cause me’); and the coffee-table books that are increasingly popular in Cairo’s gated communities; a new kind of home decor for a new kind of insular wealth. In the months before the Egyptian revolution, Wassef watches as sales of self-help books skyrocket: ‘Egyptians, tired of waiting for the government to help them, looked for arenas where they could help themselves,’ she writes. (Egyptians, Wassef claims, invented the self-help genre – the morally instructive Maxims of Ptahhotep was written sometime between 2400 and 2500 BCE. In my time in the city, the runaway bestseller was Why Men Marry Bitches: A guide for women who are too nice by Sherry Argov).

‘Those shelves have power,’ a crotchety customer warns Wassef: ‘use it wisely.’ She feels the weight of that power, particularly when it comes to stocking Diwan’s ‘Egypt Essentials’ section. For how do you tell the story of a place that stands in the literal and existential shadow of the Pyramids? Romanticised, mythologised, colonised, nationalised, pathologised, and plundered: Egypt defies the easy slipstream of narrative. Nostalgia is a national pastime, but every mind conjures a different country, so memory is a conversational battlefield. ‘Searching for something, I gathered images of my home in one place,’ Wassef explains. ‘Our eclectic collection would introduce the coloniser to the colonised, the historians to the novelists, the locals to the outsiders.’ It was a collection as much for Egyptians as tourists; a chance to reclaim a history too long defined and gatekept by others. ‘Westerners created Egyptology then taught it to the Egyptians,’ Wassef laments. ‘There’s a double irony in the way that colonialism first severs us from our past and then forces us to turn to the colonisers for knowledge of that very past.’ (It is perhaps no accident that Edward Said, author of Orientalism, 1978, and founder of postcolonialism, spent his formative years in Zamalek.)

I spent hours browsing in Egypt Essentials, revelling in its kaleidoscopic portraiture. Wassef’s ‘modern mythology’ made space for sumptuous catalogues of King Tut’s tomb jewellery, Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937), and fictional forays into Cairo’s Queer underground (see In The Spider’s Room, 2017, Muhammad Abdelnabi, or Guapa, 2016, Saleem Haddad). Naguib Mahfouz’s entire back catalogue was there – in all its capacious, Nobel Prize-winning glory – next to photo-essays on revolutionary graffiti, joyful histories of Egyptian cinema, and illustrated maps of the Valley of the Kings. There were memoirs from Jewish families exiled by Nasser in the 1950s (The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, 2007, Lucette Lagnado), and the diaries of feckless nineteenth-century British toffs who shipped parlour pianos and iron beds across Europe to provision their Nile cruises. It was on the shelves of Egypt Essentials that I discovered Sex in the Citadel: Intimate life in a changing Arab world (2013), by Egyptian-British journalist Shereen El Feki; the raw-toothed feminist fiction of Nawal El Sadaawi; and my favourite Egyptian fiction: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964).

Ghali’s heavily autobiographical novel was the first book I bought at Diwan, and I read it in one jetlag-jittery jag on that first night in Cairo, listening to the party boats echoing up and down the river. It’s the story of a young man from a bankrupted branch of a wealthy Cairene family, who carouses his way across the city while his relatives pick up the tab to keep the old-money honour intact. The man can’t take a job – it would give the game away – so he’s stuck in a kind of indolent rage, a septic inertia. Around him, Cairo is also stuck, nursing a vicious post-colonial hangover

Beer in the Snooker Club was Ghali’s only novel (he died by suicide in 1969), but his send-up of Cairene classism still echoes. ‘While my staff and I inhabited the same city,’ Wassef writes more than five decades later, ‘our cities were not the same.’ There’s no escaping the fact that Wassef comes from wealth; that she had the means to open a luxury-goods store in the heart of well-monied Zamalek, and the choice to leave it – and Egypt – when it suited her. There’s also no question that, for fifteen years, she worked herself into the dust to make Diwan viable. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is frank about both: the work, and the privilege underpinning it.

Arabic books, for example, consistently outsell English language books in the store, but it’s the imported books that keep Diwan’s doors open; an uneasy cultural bargain with a tenacious whiff of empire. ‘Our local customer-service staff sold foreign books that, in some cases, cost more than their modest salaries,’ Wassef admits. We watch the women of Diwan sew the trouser pockets of store uniforms shut – lest their employees nick any loose notes – and then travel home in their slick SUVs, chauffeured by personal drivers. The Cairo I recognise is here. I bought those glossy international books, and had change to spare for carrot cake. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Diwan’s newer outlets are in the city’s mega-malls, out on the edge of the desert, where artificial ice rinks keep captive penguins, and middle-class consumers go home to compound life. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is more than the tale of a bookstore: it’s a portrait of the city’s fast-fading micro-economies, like Zamalek, where wealthier families have visible, tangible relationships with neighbourhood traders: the family butcher, the baladi bread maker, the street-side shirt ironer. It’s a life that’s easy to sentimentalise – and Wassef does – an amiably patrician model of inter-generational patronage. But as the New Administrative Capital (NAC) takes shape an hour east of Cairo – a city built entirely of high-walled enclaves – there’s an accelerating sense of civic fracture. It’s hard to care about something (or someone) you don’t see.

I used to run a weekly creative writing workshop in Cairo around the corner from Diwan, and I’d often begin by asking my fellow writers to pen love poems to their shape-shifting city. ‘Mish mumkin,’ they’d say. ‘Not possible.’ And then they’d go on to write extraordinary pages, full of fury and forgiveness, and scabrously funny (Oh, Cairo, how you piss me off!). ‘Diwan was my love letter to Egypt,’ Wassef writes. ‘And this book is my love letter to Diwan.’ Like those mish mumkin poems, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is honest about its city – the class-riven cruelties, the misogyny, the revolution’s squandered opportunity – but it’s also full of broken-hearted love: ardent and irreverent (and elaborately sweary as befits any self-respecting Cairene; my running list of Arabic curses tops a dozen pages). ‘Those of us who write love letters know that their aims are impossible,’ Wassef writes. ‘We try, and fail, to make the ethereal material.’ Impossible perhaps, but if you find yourself in Zamalek, you can still visit Diwan. For now, at least, she is still there.

The title of Miriam Margolyes’s memoir, This Much Is True, strikes a declamatory note, well suited to the octogenarian actor whose greatest asset is her voice, with its diverse accents, timbres, and moods. It also proclaims that we are not going to have the wool pulled over our eyes, or to be frustrated by authorial modesty, tact, or political correctness.

The Australian team that won the 1991 Rugby World Cup must rank as one of our most charismatic national sport teams in modern times. The side that defeated England in the final at London’s Twickenham Stadium included several players now regarded as undisputed greats of global rugby: John Eales, Tim Horan, Jason Little, Michael Lynagh, and captain Nick Farr-Jones. There were also stirring ‘underdog’ stories: players who seemed to rise from nowhere that year to play starring roles, such as fullback Marty Roebuck and wing Rob Egerton. In Tonga-born flanker Viliami Ofahengaue, there was an early hint of the changing demographic of élite rugby players in Australia.

Frances Burke (1904–94) was the leading textile designer in Melbourne from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her modernist furnishing fabrics, preferred by architects, interior designers, department stores, and homemakers, were popular in domestic and commercial interiors, and her reputation was national. Her design skills were complemented by a good head for business and her command of all aspects of production, distribution, and marketing. The distinctive style of her textile designs is neatly summarised by the authors of this splendid volume: ‘ A single, bright colour and clean, simple linework printed on quality cotton or linen made Frances Burke’s designs modern in style, instantly identifiable and very appealing.’ Burke’s wide-ranging design sources included flora and fauna, indigenous and exotic themes, as illustrated in a selection of her titles: Canna Leaf, Tiger Lily, Seapiece, Totem, Rangga, Pacifica and Moresque.

Editorial cartoonists gamble their all on a same-day art, their work created, read, and discarded on the day of publication. The makers of graphic novel journalism use the language of cartooning, too, but in their case it’s a marathon, not a sprint: they spend years arranging thousands of images and tens of thousands of words across hundreds of pages in order to create their books. Two new graphic novels cast a picto-critical eye on the war in Vietnam and show how it came home to roost, bringing death and imprisonment to suburban streets in Australia and the United States.

In Kent State: Four dead in Ohio, American cartoonist Derf Backderf documents the four days in May 1970 that led to Ohio National Guard troops shooting students protesting against American involvement in the Vietnam War. As in his previous graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer (2012), about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Backderf’s own life intersects with a national narrative: in the first scene, his mother drives the ten-year-old Backderf past a platoon of National Guardsmen who have been deployed to bust a truck drivers’ strike. Four days later, these same soldiers will fire on the protesting twenty-year-olds on the Kent State University campus, killing four and wounding nine. The confrontation that the Backderfs drive past sets the scene for the physically violent clashes between the law and protesters, presented throughout the book in disturbing visceral cartooning, culminating in the day of the killings: 4 May 1970.

On 19 November 2021, a delegation of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community leaders and prominent local non-Indigenous representatives presented a letter to Moreland City Council, in the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne, asking that the Council be renamed. As the petitioners pointed out, Moreland – a name given to parts of the area in 1839 by Scottish settler Farquhar McCrae and then adopted by the local Council in 1994 – was the name of a Jamaican slave plantation to which McCrae’s family had a connection.

Renaming the Council, the letter’s authors asserted, would be an ‘opportunity to complement the current spirit of truth-telling and reconciliation’, bringing about greater awareness of both the global legacies of enslavement and the dispossession of Wurundjeri people in Melbourne and, fundamentally, healing for the descendants of those people and for those who call Moreland home today. The petitioners did not suggest a new name but asked the Council to consult with relevant stakeholders, specifically the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, in order to establish an alternative name.

Anna Clark is the author of Making Australian History (Penguin), a history of Australian history, and has written extensively on history education, historiography, and historical consciousness. She is currently Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney.

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

The underwater world is my happy, calming place, so I’d have to say a protected marine zone where I can get a glimpse of what Australia’s natural bounty must once have been like everywhere.

Don Anderson taught American, Australian, Irish, and English Literature at the University of Sydney from 1965 to 2000. Since 1982 he has written for ABR more than sixty times. His reviews and essays have also appeared in The Age Monthly Review, The Bulletin, Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Southerly, Meanjin, Quadrant, The National Times, Westerly, Island, and The Independent Monthly. His critical writings are collected in Hot Copy (1986), Real Opinions (1992), and Text & Sex (1995).

What makes a fine critic?

If we believe T.S. Eliot, ‘There is no method but to be very intelligent.’ Of which one might observe, to invoke an old philosophical distinction, that it is surely necessary but hardly sufficient. Gore Vidal, writing of Italo Calvino, insisted on admiration and description, encouraging his reader to read Calvino (‘the critic’s single aim’).

In You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006), Wole Soyinka’s final volume of memoirs, the writer cites a piece of Yoruba wisdom: ‘T’ágbà bá ńdé, à á yé ogun jà – as one approaches an elder’s status, one ceases to indulge in battles’. This was once the hope of a man who describes himself as a ‘closet glutton for tranquillity’. At one point, Soyinka even dared to think that he would assume the position of a serene elder at forty-nine: seven times seven, the sacred number of Ogun, his companion deity. But Ogun is wilful as protector and muse. The life the god carved for Soyinka took the image of his own restlessness. A poet, playwright, novelist, and Nobel Laureate, Soyinka remains an activist for democracy, his bona fides hard won as a political prisoner during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) and in exile during the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha (1993–98).

When Anne Shirley dreamed of finding a ‘bosom friend’ in Avonlea, she did more than conjure Diana Barry into existence. The heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) imprinted on us an almost impossible standard for what to expect from our earliest female friendships: a lifelong source of joy sustained by a mutual devotion to each other’s best interests. More often than not, however – as the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels attests – childhood friendships are as complicated as any other. And when they rupture, whether through accident, argument, or design, the aftershocks can last well into adulthood.

The Golden Book by Kate Ryan

Scribe, $29.99 pb, 256 pp

In Kate Ryan’s accomplished début, The Golden Book, the relationship between the protagonist, Ali, and her childhood friend, Jessie, is a complicated one. In this case, the ‘golden book’ of the title isn’t some rosy-eyed reference to carefree days of innocence now gone, but an actual document, a record of the risks and initiations undertaken by the girls as they grow up in a small town on the New South Wales coast. Years later, Ali – now a mother herself and having long since left both the town and her friendship with Jessie behind – receives a phone call to say that Jessie has died. Returning ‘home’ for the funeral, Ali is forced to reckon with her fraught memories of their friendship and what responsibility she bears for the devastating way in which it ended.

Jumping between the life of the adult Ali, with all its complications, and vivid flashbacks of her time with Jessie, The Golden Book moves seamlessly across time. Ryan’s language is direct and unshowy; she paces the story with admirable restraint, letting Ali’s memories unfurl slowly until the full picture of what happened between her and Jessie is revealed.

The chief joy of the novel is in Ryan’s nuanced portrayal of childhood friendship. Wild Jessie, with her boundless freedoms, artistic but disengaged mother, and host of older brothers, is an object of envy to the more cautious Ali, with her schoolteacher parents and strict routine. Yet Jessie, for all her recklessness, can also be suffocatingly needy, and Ali wields one significant advantage over her friend, which she is not afraid to use to her benefit. Ryan has a keen eye and an empathetic understanding of these shifting power dynamics; the relationship between the two girls feels realistic and fully realised. Also drawn sensitively is the relationship between Ali and her pre-teenage daughter, Tam, whose intense friendship with another girl once more brings Ali’s childhood fears to the surface. The result is a thoughtful and unassuming novel that raises questions about guilt, blame, and the fickleness of memory.

The Beautiful Words by Vanessa McCausland

HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 368 pp

Dealing with similar themes but with a very different feel is journalist Vanessa McCausland’s third novel, The Beautiful Words. Here, the two best friends in question are Sylvie and Kase, who share an idyllic childhood growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches – until one night, when a party on the beach leads to a tragedy, causing Sylvie to lose her short-term memory and the friends to never speak again.

Twenty years later, Sylvie, now working as a cleaner of deceased estates and still suffering from memory problems, receives an invitation to attend Kase’s fortieth birthday party on a windswept island off the Tasmanian coast. Desperate to find out what happened, she accepts. But just as the friendship between the two women starts to repair, they discover that their mothers have a shared and equally fractured history of their own.

Told across four timelines – the current day, the friendship between Sylvie and Kase, that of their mothers, Franny and Eve, and the night of the beach party – what could be an overly complicated structure is made relatively straightforward thanks to clear signposting. McCausland uses this framework effectively, allowing the separate storylines to illuminate each other and the tension to build until the secrets at the heart of each friendship are exposed. She creates a strong sense of place at each turn and captures well the shifting tides of adult friendship and how allegiances shift as circumstances change. In particular, she articulates the discombobulation of coming back to a friendship after many years away; of knowing so much about a person’s early life and so little about the person they have become.

After such a sustained build-up, however, the conclusion feels rather rushed. In the final section of the novel, the plot takes a detour into #MeToo territory. It’s an unexpected turn but a welcome one, giving the plot a much-needed shot in the arm and saving it from predictability. Frustratingly, it occurs too late in the narrative to feel like anything other than a plot device to facilitate a happy ending. It seems like a missed opportunity, not only for the novel to explore the questions it raises about wealth, power, and influence, but also the ways in which those who possess them can dictate our memory of events.

The Wingmaker by Mette Jakobsen

Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 224 pp

For Vega, the protagonist of The Wingmaker, the third novel by Danish-Australian author Mette Jakobsen, it’s the desire to avoid human contact altogether that prompts the events of the novel. As the narrative begins, the art conservator has arrived at the icy, dilapidated Seafarers’ Hotel looking to be alone. Suffering from a broken heart both literally and metaphorically, having recently suffered a heart attack and been dumped by her partner, Vega is hoping the ramshackle hotel will offer her not only a chance to recover but an opportunity to work on her latest commission: reconstructing the wings of a beautiful but sad-looking marble angel. But her enforced solitude is not to be. Already inhabiting the hotel is an eccentric handyman, Gunnar, who is battling a few demons of his own. Soon he’s joined by others: a group of tango-dancing local farmers and, most importantly, Vega’s estranged adopted sister, the freewheeling, party-loving Suze.

In the hands of other writers, such a quirky set-up might seem painfully contrived and embarrassingly clunky. It’s a credit to Jakobsen’s writing and her lightness of touch that it comes across as charming instead. Jakobsen is an expert at creating jewel-like moments that often feel filmic. At times, the novel feels more like a collection of interconnected scenes than a coherent whole: an accruement of impressions that never quite become more than the sum of their parts. The characters seem to exist in a vacuum, free of any context beyond the odd memory or two recounted by Vega. Without those foundations, it’s difficult to engage with them on a deeper level or to care much about what happens to them when the book ends.

That said, however, there’s a lot to like about The Wingmaker. It’s quietly beguiling, and there’s a clear lesson to be gleaned about the importance of being vulnerable and accepting help as a path to healing. With a happy ending virtually guaranteed, the reader is free to enjoy the journey, every whimsical step of the way.

Writing in The New York Times on 15 December 2020, three days after John le Carré’s death, Philippe Sands, genocide scholar and professor of law at University College London, recounted a 1962 encounter in Vienna between his friend (Sands knew Le Carré by his birth name, David Cornwell) and the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Cornwell had asked Wiesenthal how he could continue to live in the city, given Vienna’s history of anti-Semitism. Wiesenthal replied: ‘If you are studying the disease you have to live in the swamp.’

Edith Wharton, famed purveyor of ghost stories, said that she needed her reader to meet her halfway among the primeval shadows; that to believe in the fetches, haunts, and other ‘spectral strap-hangers’ that filled her pages one must still be able to hear the distant echo of the hoarse music of the northern Urwald or the churning darks seas of the outermost shores. The spectral presence in Louise Edrich’s new novel, The Sentence, appears in the midst of a decidedly unghostly suburban Minneapolis, but so compelling a presence is the phantasm of Flora that the reader embraces her wholeheartedly, diving without question into those primeval shadows where wraiths lurk.

It is the singular Tookie, an Ojibwe woman who has found redemption from a lifetime of strife and sorrow working at a bookshop specialising in Native American literature, that Flora has chosen to haunt. Having spent ten years in prison, Tookie marvels at her miraculous new life, which contains ‘a regular little house’, a job, and a kind husband. ‘Knowing what I know of my tribe’s history, remembering what I can bear to remember of my own,’ Tookie says, ‘I can only call the life I live now a life of heaven.’ The novel is both the unfolding tale of Flora’s haunting of the mordant, whip-smart Tookie, and a limning of other kinds of spectres from Native American history that rise up and threaten to overwhelm the precariously balanced present.

In his provocative 2006 book Native American Fiction: A user’s manual, the Ojibwe novelist and academic David Treuer bemoans what he terms ‘the legendary mist of Indian misery’ that, to his mind, suffuses the work of many of his contemporaries. ‘How does one escape this all-pervading thing, exoticized foreknowledge?’ he asks, claiming that much of Native American writing is read for its cultural authenticity rather than as literature. Erdrich, too, has been preoccupied with these kind of questions of white appropriation, condescending sympathy, and sentimental racism – in life and in literature. The Sentence takes up this fraught issue in a far more overt manner than Erdrich’s previous work. In the bookstore, Tookie encounters earnest white customers she terms ‘wannabes’, who confide to her that they always wanted to be Indians as children, telling her tales of sleeping in tipis made of blankets, playing at fighting cowboys, and tying their sisters to trees. ‘The person is proud of having identified with an underdog and wants some affirmation from an actual Indigenous person,’ says Tookie. She is also assailed with questions ranging from ‘Can you appraise my turquoise necklace?’ to ‘What’s a cultural Indian thing that would fit into our funeral service?’ Tookie tries to sell these sorts of customers Paul Chaat Smith’s Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, but notes wryly that they hardly ever buy it.

Before her death, Flora’s obsession with all things Native American has turned into an ‘unaccountable, persistent, self-obliterating delusion’. At first, she tells people that she had been an Indian in a former life, then later invents a Native American ancestor, producing a photograph of a ‘grim woman in a shawl’ that Tookie suspects she has plucked from a junk store bin. She attends every powwow and has made herself a traditional dance outfit of buckskin and purple beadwork. But Flora’s ‘Nativephilia’ has a positive side to it, too; she fosters Native American teen runaways, attends protests, raises money for a Native American women’s refuge, and is generally devoted to good works in the community. ‘So what if she needed, however fake, a connection?’ asks Tookie. Slightly unnerving and acquisitive in life, Flora’s obsession becomes openly sinister in her spectral form; she wants to take possession of Tookie.

For a ghost story, The Sentence is also intensely preoccupied with worldly concerns and veers frequently into social realism, vividly chronicling a fractured and uneasy nation. The novel is set mostly in 2020, during the pandemic, and also encompasses the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing outrage. Erdrich brilliantly expresses feelings about the recent calamity that often remain inchoate for the rest of us in prose that is never solipsistic or sentimental. Tookie reflects on the way that ‘we straggled through a year that sometimes seemed like the beginning of the end. A slow tornado. I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year.’ In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, Tookie describes the way that the smell of popcorn is a blessed reprieve from the smell of spent tear gas – ‘sour, musky, chalk’.

Erdrich’s rendering of the catastrophic events of recent times is perfectly counterposed with her unfolding of the central ghost story, and the tapestry of intersecting individual lives that she so skilfully weaves. The characters are never entirely subsumed by the sweep of history, either distant or recent, though, like the ghost of Flora, it threatens to overwhelm them at all times.

In a 2016 New Yorker essay on the Standing Rock pipeline protests, Erdrich writes about the way that history is a living force in the Lakota way of life. ‘Each of the great events in their common destiny includes the direct experience of ancestors, whose names live on in their descendants.’ By the end of The Sentence, the reader comes to realise that perhaps a novel full of ghosts, in all their different guises, is exactly the right thing for our own haunted, and haunting, times.

‘See, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.’ So begins Hannah Kent’s wide-ranging and poetic new novel, signalling its key themes of love, longing, and the pain that arises from division. While hands reach out, desperately seeking each other, Devotion explores the possibilities and the limits of such clasping. This is a powerful narrative that grapples with what connects passionate bodies and hearts and what might keep them apart, be it physical distance, religious constraint, or the limits of the imagination. Through the motif of devotion – religious, emotional, sexual – Kent’s skilful novel considers the fundamental human experiences of attachment and desire as experienced by characters who carry the weighty impress of the past, with its complex tracery of love, geography, and suffering, into the unfolding possibilities of new worlds.

‘Endings & Spacings’ opens with a confession: after several decades of ‘making connections / through strings of words’, Pam Brown is no closer to answering the question, ‘what does a poet / do’? In interviews, Brown tends to describe writing poetry as a kind of ‘benign compulsion’, an engagement with the world that must be critical to be interesting but that ‘can’t answer questions any better than anything else’, as she asserted in Meanjin in 2001 and has resolutely maintained ever since. In her latest collection, Endings & Spacings, even this benign compulsion – ‘dwindling now’ – comes under threat, its benignity troubled by the resemblance between arranging lines on the page and the curation of fragments in a virtual ‘museum / of imperial plunder’.

Brown’s preoccupation with the historical detritus of human existence – in memories, photographs, Christmas decorations, and rotting bouquets – comes to a head here, as does her ambivalence towards the task of cataloguing and arranging (‘not composing’) such material for an audience caught in the same ‘networks / of self confirmation’ as herself. If we understand detritus in Brown’s work through Mckenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead (2019) – the framework of which looms large in both Brown’s and Disney’s collections – we could say that Brown’s world is thickly layered with what Wark refers to as the ‘practico-inert’, material evidence of the past which testifies to the difficulty of putting human ideals into practice. Its population is thus rendered passive and indifferent by the seemingly insurmountable challenges posed by the overheated junkyard of the present. Brown is not so much sanguine about this state of paralysing inertia as she is sceptical about the alternative – or at least suspicious about giving settler Australian poetry a more affirmative role in the making of history.

This might explain the tension between connectivity and isolation that runs through this collection, particularly in the alignment of text on the page. The question is not so much how to connect during the apocalypse – these poems are full of connections, between ‘strings of words’, images, memories, even between poets themselves, primarily over Zoom – but rather, whether there’s any point in meeting up with one other person for an hour of socially distanced exercise when you ‘don’t want / to   w a l k / any where any more’. This sentiment predominates in ‘(crossing my mind)’, the first of the three loosely divided poems comprising the collection, and is developed further in the second poem, ‘(lingering)’, as in the description of a ‘pocket park’, a ‘favourite / outdoor wedding / location’. The spacing of text on the page is initially playful, responsive to the topography of the scene, before flattening abruptly into a subdued list – ‘silver bits / white tat / ashy peach / organza / chintz flakes’ – and finally abandoning the task of cataloguing altogether – ‘rubbish / left behind’.

The compulsion that underwrites ‘Endings & Spacings’ may be dwindling, but it is still the compulsion of one of Australia’s best contemporary poets. It is no surprise, then, that the result is clear-headed, specific, and never predictable on the level of the word, the line, the caesura, the page. These poems are peppered with quick, luminous moments even as they meditate on passivity, blurring the line between acceleration and inertia – walking to a ‘field of weeds’ is ‘like / nimbling / an interior Besozzo’, purple king beans scream ‘all the way / from pot to pan’, ‘clumsy bats / echo-lob across an ordinary horizon’ and the supermoon might be ‘waning / but it’s bright’. Brown doesn’t reconcile this tension in the final lines of the collection:

in the pandemic
                 we didn’t take any photos
                                  of our infrequent
                  endings                 spacings
&
     get togethers
 
we’ll have to
                    make up for it

maybe

In avoiding a clear conclusion, this ‘denouemental’ closing statement invites and rewards rereading, maybe even lingering.

Disney addresses similar anxieties about documentation and history with his image of an army of Benjaminian angels, ‘backs / turned on the present’, ‘shooting || / selfies for future museums’. Like Brown, and Wark, Disney is concerned with the accumulation of the practico-inert, looming ominously in the background as the angels shoot their selfies: ‘our histories / storming in / -dustrial, propulsive, a piling / reserve of debris’.

However, the very notion of ‘inertia’ for Disney must also be understood as fundamentally destabilised by the growth imperative of contemporary capitalism, so that it no longer describes the tendency of matter to maintain its state of (im)mobility but rather the maintenance of an ever-increasing rate of acceleration. This state of frenetic standstill is evoked in ‘Conversations in taxis’, the spinning ‘cab an unstill point’ as the driver reminds his passengers that ‘accelerations & inertia’ are ‘one & the same’. While this certainly resonates with Brown’s ‘unending bad news’ (can ‘worse / get any worse’?) the difference is that Disney approaches this so-called ‘age of screen-blinded, willfully ignorant, atomized Homo digitalis’ with an optimistic belief in poetry’s capacity to ‘unroll our fists into outstretched hands that can beckon, wave, reach out’ (Kenyon Review, 2019).

Is Disney’s solution, then, for the angels to put down their phones, look around themselves, and maybe write a poem about bees? Perhaps. But for a poem about bees to be useful at this point in history – in which Australian farmers are importing Israeli robot bees to cut costs on pollinating their tomatoes – it can’t be written in the same language that poets have been using to write about bees for hundreds of years. accelerations & inertias marks the next chapter in Disney’s ongoing search for an updated poetic language, something with the capacity to ‘deprogram our biorhythms of indifference’. This is most obvious in his use of homophonic and machine translation in his engagement with Korean poetic traditions, and the use of the coding symbols ‘>>>’ and ‘||’ in the title and body of his collection. The myriad ways that Disney engages with digital languages suggest a concurrence with the speaker in ‘Coronation’, who characterises the late capitalist apocalypse as simply ‘one more / operating system’. Yet rather than wondering ‘how to contact Admin. / Troubleshooting, those || who wrote the code’, Disney proposes something closer to a collective Warkian hacking. The parallel lines of the ||, or caesura – a scission that is also a pause, a space, between units of rhythm and speech – gesture towards a mode of coming together that is neither an act of fusion nor an acceptance of the limits of one’s material conditions. Rather, it symbolises the inertia of materiality itself in developing a new kind of resistance.

The extent to which Disney’s work is informed by this possible resistance – his commitment to poetry as a means of ‘strid[ing] together into a dialectic of intelligent, courageous, unflappable hope’ (2019) – is at once thoughtful, compelling, and a little annoying. The structural constraints adopted throughout are helpful to the extent that they highlight the improvisational fluidity of balancing broken syntax, which is Disney’s strong point. If he occasionally veers towards the intentionally mawkish, even a little smug, this is mercifully offset by moments of self-awareness and playful humour (‘thinking, thinking || fuckoffificatorily’).

The most effective moments in accelerations & inertias are understated, and involve people showing each other things. In my favourite poem, ‘Bukhansan Dreaming’, two people are together in a forest, one explaining repeatedly: ‘this one / my favourite tree’, ‘these are / the best stones’. This act of sharing, in its intimate simplicity, recalls Disney’s epigraph: ‘things explain each other, / Not themselves’. It also resonates with one of the more poignant passages in ‘Endings & Spacings’, in which the speaker observes the night sky with her partner, J. The beauty in this scene is not in the stars or the waning moon; the description of the sky itself is underwhelming, slipping almost immediately into a meditation on Eureka nationalism and suburban driveways. Rather, it’s in the showing, the presentation, and in the presentation of the presentation that there’s something stubbornly moving:

   J says
   there are planets lining up
         she means it     i mean
                             they really are

‘The wave always returns’, writes Marina Tsvetaeva. And it ‘always returns as a different wave’. Such Color reveals such a relentless renewal of lyricism as a signature of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry. A selected edition promises to highlight images and ideas across the American poet’s work. For Smith, one constant is the movement of water. In ‘Minister of Saudade’, from her second collection, Duende (2007), the speaker asks: ‘What kind of game is the sea?’ After a pause at the stanza break, an incantatory reply comes: ‘Lap and drag. Crag and gleam. / The continual work of wave / And tide.’ Ceaseless making, flux, and patterning are also a poem’s work. Smith’s image of creative marine energy recalls Sylvia Plath’s image of words’ ‘indefatigable hooftaps’, echoing as they carry meaning outwards. In Plath’s case, as in Smith’s, one direction is seawards.

It is disconcerting how the author of seven poetry collections can ambush the normally attentive reader of Australian poetry with such a forceful body of work as David Musgrave’s Selected Poems, which runs to more than two hundred pages. Musgrave’s individual collections have appeared with various publishers over the years since To Thalia back in 2004, but insufficient attention has been paid to them.

‘The flag’s taking off for that filthy place, and our jargon’s drowning out the drums.’ A. Frances Johnson’s new collection begins with this quote from Rimbaud, which immediately betrays her appreciation for both the European avant-garde and the viral nature of the context from which it emerged. Johnson is a poet, painter, novelist, and academic acutely sensitive to such colonial haunts, perhaps largely due to the delight she takes in the other tones offered up by historical subject matter. She has displayed this previously in Eugene’s Falls (2007), an expansive novel about Eugene von Guérard, and in exhibitions dealing with the ambiguous textures of botanical empire building. Interestingly, though, her layers of historical literacy have led to a skilful inspection of her own aesthetic fetishes, writing as she does in a time when ever more bilge-water seems to be issuing from the half-drowned ship of Western culture.

‘Wasn’t sexual expression a principal motivation of gay and queer dancefloors … Isn’t that the freedom we were fighting for? To be kinky dirty fuckers, without shame; to not sanitise ourselves in the bid for equality?’ So exhorts DJ Lanny K in 2013, reflecting on his time spinning discs at down-and-out pubs in ungentrified Surry Hills in the mid-1990s as part of Sydney’s fomenting queer subculture. Lanny K, Sydney-based Canadian immigrant, is one of a handful of artists – performance artists, dancers, even a tattooist – interviewed by Fiona McGregor in her collection of essays Buried Not Dead. Mostly written between 2013 and 2020, each essay is based on a rolling interview with an artist and draws out their recollections of early practices and careers, several united by reference to a specific time and place – Sydney’s emergent gay scene in the mid-1990s.

In this accessible contribution to the burgeoning literature on democracy’s travails and what to do about them, Jan-Werner Müller makes a case for hard borders and fundamental principles. These are not the hard borders desired by authoritarian leaders. Instead, Müller asks us to go back to basics (he uses the concept riduzione verso il principo) to establish some hard borders in our understanding – and hence practice – of democracy. Those borders should be drawn around the fundamental democratic principles of uncertainty and equality. At its most basic, this is a call to reimagine and reinvest in the intermediary institutions of representative democracy – particularly parties and autonomous media – to restore the infrastructure of democratic politics in the developed world.

When World War II began, a defence regulation was issued in Great Britain that enabled the home secretary to imprison anyone who they reasonably believed had hostile associations. One such interned individual, Robert Liversidge, objected to his detention and challenged the validity of the home secretary’s decision. In the subsequent case, Liversidge v Anderson, the House of Lords adopted a deferential approach, holding that in a time of war it was inappropriate for the courts to subject the home secretary’s decision making to much scrutiny. But in a thundering dissent, Brisbane-born Lord James ‘Dick’ Atkin disagreed. ‘In England, amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent,’ he wrote. ‘They may be changed, but they speak the same language in war as in peace.’

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the planet Trentor is the capital of the Galactic Empire. Seen from space, Trentor is nothing but city: there are no rivers, trees, or any other natural features, only an endless urban landscape, a metropolis that has taken over the planet. Landing in Mexico City feels like landing in Trentor: the size is overwhelming, and its apparent infinity challenges most people’s understanding of a city. Juan Villoro calls this sensation ‘horizontal vertigo’. The term is borrowed from a description of the grazing lands of the Argentine pampa, and Villoro chose it as the apt title of his chronicle of Mexico City.

In These Precious Days, her second essay collection (after This is the Story of a Happy Marriage in 2013), celebrated American writer Ann Patchett sets out to explore ‘what matter[s] most in this precarious and precious life’. Patchett is the author of seven novels, including Bel Canto (2001), which won the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction, and her most recent, the internationally acclaimed The Dutch House (2019). When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Patchett did not have a novel in progress and decided that 2020 was not the time to start one. Instead, she wrote essays, something she has always done when she doesn’t have a novel on the go. Eventually she wrote the title essay about providing shelter and solace to a friend undergoing cancer treatment. It meant so much to her that it needed ‘a solid shelter’, so she crafted this book around it. It is a collection of twenty-two essays (plus an introduction and epilogue) – some of them new, some reworked versions of previously published work – in which she ‘grapples with’ themes that preoccupy her in work and life: ‘what I needed, whom I loved, what I could let go, and how much energy the letting go would take’.

In my thirty years as an academic, the greatest joy and puzzlement I had was in teaching poetry. I agree with T.S. Eliot that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. Our best teaching often involves what we do not fully understand. The scholar D.S. Carne-Ross once argued that, upon hearing poetry spoken in an unfamiliar language, you can tell it is poetry, the language of poetry, which is other than what I do in writing this review. Anyone faced with the problem of teaching poetry in an academic setting will realise that part of the problem is the academic setting itself. Poetry has thrived for millennia everywhere on earth without the benefit of professors, classrooms, and theories of reading. How, then, might we teach it?

Patrick White’s plays are conventionally assigned a marginal place in the landscape of his writing. Historically, they have either been regarded as poetic but unconvincing extensions of the performative dimensions of his prose, or as fundamentally misconceived exercises in contempt. Tim Winton spoke for the latter camp when, writing in the London Review of Books (22 June 1995), he dismissed White’s dramatic work as a ‘long and wasteful engagement with the theatre and its poisonous hangers-on’. Winton’s judgement is informed by a solitary model of authorship that can be applied to the rural metaphysics of White’s Castle Hill novels but that is increasingly inapplicable to the urbane satires his work became following his move to inner-Sydney in 1964.

In 1995, a new online marketplace called Amazon sent out its first press release, with its thirty-one-year-old founder, Jeff Bezos, proclaiming: ‘We are able to offer more items for sale than any retailer in history, thanks entirely to the Internet.’ Nearly three decades later – Amazon having steroidally expanded from a book retailer to a multinational hydra of e-commerce, cloud storage, and digital streaming – this is no longer hyperbole. The company absorbs at least half of America’s online spending, and nearly 150 million US citizens subscribe to Amazon Prime, roughly the same number that voted in the recent presidential election. In 2020, while the pandemic crippled most industries, Amazon’s net profit swelled by eighty-four per cent. Today, Jeff Bezos is valued at US$200 billion – approximately the value of New Zealand’s GDP.