AustLit

'My life was confusing, I felt tangled as the moonahs, nothing so organised and purposeful as a coherent essay would evince. And yet, the tangle of those trees right there, the copse of moonahs I was thinking of, and writing beside, was beautiful for all its tangle. Its weird and wonderful shapes and sinuosities.'  (Introduction)

'The English poet Mark Ford has been a champion of the poetry of John Ashbery for many years. He is the editor of Ashbery’s Collected Poems and has curated various archives and exhibitions of what many believe to be the most significant poetic voice to emerge from the US since World War II.' (Introduction)

'The proliferation goes on. The amount of new words being coined to name the reality and effects of our current era of natural and cultural crisis seems at times to be some kind of teeming linguistic correction to species extinction on a heating planet. I’ve listed them before in essays and reviews — anthropocene, capitalocene, ecocene, symbiocene, gynocene, chthulucene, etc. I’ve added moolacene, which employs the Wadawurrung word moola from my local region, meaning “shadow”. Moola is, of course, also the US-derived slang word for money, which many think is at the heart of the issue.' (Introduction)

'That poet John Kinsella is abrasive as a ­xanthorrhoea, electrically sensitive as a platypus bill and self-reflexively across all issues of the anthropocene is by now well integrated into his writing identity. With Open Door, the third of his Jam Tree Gully cycle, we find him returning to his family’s rural block on Ballardong Noongar land in Western Australia’s vast wheatbelt. In the place he loves and hates the most Kinsella immediately finds “a Dry as ­combustible as morality”, forcing him to fit his theme of homecoming and return through a penitential lens of empathy and rage, as he ­observes the ongoing effects of agricultural cauterisation of the landscape and the suffering of creatures in his midst. This is the poet as ­activist-crusader and student of animals, once again exhibiting his membership of a species increasingly tortured by its own culpability. As such, Open Door is ironically caged, not only by the obviousness of climate change, the bleeding obvious, but by how to write about it in the face of what amounts to a culturally arthritic denial.' (Publication summary)

'1988. It is five years after the Ash Wednesday bushfires, which devastated many parts of Victoria, including the coastline of the Eastern Otways. It is also Australia’s Bicentennial year. A man in his early twenties sits on the step of a small fibro bungalow in the Aireys Inlet riverflat, in the thick shade of two towering old macrocarpa pines. Catching the light at his feet is a loamy brocade of russet pine needles, stretching across the yard to the sunroom of his house, one of the few buildings in the town to survive the fires.'(Introduction) 

'When Claude Monet lived in Argenteuil in the 1870s, he famously worked in a studio-boat on the Seine. He painted the river, he painted bridges over the river, he painted snow, the sky, his children and his wife, and, famously, a field of red poppies with a large country house in the background. Argenteuil is to Paris roughly what Heidelberg and Templestowe are to Melbourne. Once a riparian haven for plein air painters interested in capturing the transient optics of natural phenomena, it is now a suburban interface with a diminishing habitat for anything but humans.'(Introduction) 

'Lorne, Victoria, 1937. Who could say the name of the pollen that was billowing through the air along the road towards the pier? Who could say how many dolphins were in the pod arcing across Loutitt Bay? Who was to say how best to catch the purple crays crawling through the pools of the shelving shore, or what the name of the lemon-browed bird was bobbing in the currents between the waves?' (Introduction)

'Seeking stories of Australia's Great Ocean Road, a young writer stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the road's history, FB Herschell. It is a volume unremarkable in every way, save for the surprising portrait of its author that can be read between its lines: a vision of a man who writes with uncanny poetry about sand.

And as he continues to mine the archive of FB Herschell - engineer, historian, philosopher - it is not the subject, but the man who begins to fascinate. A man whose private revolution among the streets of Paris in May 1968 begins to change the way he views life, love, and the coastal landscape into which he was born...' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'Despite the detailed excavatory art of the finest biographies, sometimes it takes the alchemical power of fiction to approximate the emotional geography of a single human and his or her milieu. Stephen Orr’s seventh novel, a compelling and at times distressing portrait of a twentieth-century Australian painter and his family, is one such book. Roland Griffin’s resemblance to that of Russell Drysdale is clear from early on, not only through Orr’s descriptions of the type of creator Griffin is – a painter of ‘small towns, deserted pubs ... it was all he knew’ – but also through the portrait of the artist’s troubled son (Drysdale’s only son suicided at the age of twenty-one). Drysdale’s family story obviously worked as a catalyst for Incredible Floridas but rather than chronicling that story itself, Orr employs his own creative divinations to construct a breathing and tactile fictional amalgam from its outlines and contours.' (Introduction)

'When W.H. Auden took the cue for his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ from Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, he did not presume the reader’s knowledge of the iconography of the painting but rather sprang open its central and universal theme, which touches all our lives: how ‘dreadful martyrdom must run its course’. It is easy to think our lurid times are perhaps unsuited to such universalities, given the way we loudly chart even the smallest martyrdom, or indulge the biggest Trump on any manner of forums without ever feeling the need to properly situate the subject within a unifying longue durée. The cultural seeds of Trumpism may be found in most real estate offices, just as they are in Aeschylus and Dan Brown. But who cares about that? When it comes to capturing hearts and minds, umbrage and outrage are as much subject to the traction of demand and supply as anything else. At present, there are more poets writing in this country alone than there are footballers kicking goals at the highest level or politicians compromising the healthy future of our children’s climate. But where are the crowds, where is the hysteria, and the press conferences? Thankfully, not here. Like the ploughman ignoring Icarus falling into the sea in Brueghel’s painting, the workaday world and its directional spotlight will always carry on as if nothing has happened in the poetry world.' (Introduction)

'Through a suddenly lit arch in the cave of the mind, images of salt-dusted plains open up; winding paths along cliffs torn high above acidic tides; desire-lines scrawling away through serrated uplands and beyond to a tar horizon. The cave of the mind we leave, so dense with bats and thoughts, a subterrain of the senses, has offered us this: our two legs, scissors cutting away the dross; our feet, padded sensors returned tot he earth's slow philology; our heart, cradled in its basketry of ribs, sending a receiving prey and game from the brain.' (Introduction)