AustLit

'The Hard Word is the second collection from this respected and influential critic and teacher. The poems contain his trademark conversational tone combined with vivid wit and is the distillation of 12 years of poetry.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In the first century BCE the Roman poet Horace proposed that, “A poem is like a picture”, meaning that, like painting, poetry engages in mimesis by imitating life, copying it in a fixed medium. But what happens when art imitates art, as in Australian poet Rosemary Dobson’s poem, For the Painter Ben Nicholson, about the work of the British modernist?' (Introduction)

'Chloe Hooper's second novel, The Engagement (2012), was always likely to face a critical challenge. Her previous book was the multi-award-winning The Tall Man (2008), a non-fictional account of the death in police custody of an Indigenous man, Cameron Doomadgee, on Palm Island off the coast of North Queensland in 2004. Coinciding with Kevin Rudd's 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations, it was a timely work about racial injustice overshadowed by historical guilt, and was widely publicised and well received. In contrast, The Engagement, variously described as a thriller or a gothic novel, might seem frivolous, and so far has sparked no critical attention apart from reviews, most of which, while finding things to praise, also carried reservations. Owen Richardson in the Monthly-which in 2006 had published Hooper's Walkley Award-winning essay on the inquest into Doomadgee's death—thought that "it was hard not to think that Hooper's gift is slumming it a bit," and Geordie Williamson in the Australian was "not sure how successfully Hooper has held fantasy and reality in tension" (19). Kate McFadyen in Australian Book Review struck something of a common chord when she remarked: "Hooper masters all the generic plot devices, but her characters' responses and motivations do not always ring true...' (Introduction)

'The article offers information on writer Patrick White. White wrote several plays and novels. The play "The Ham Funeral" was written by him on the eve of his traveling from London, England to Australia in the year 1947. White wrote the novels "Voss" in 1957, "The Vivisector" in the year 1970, and the "Shepherd on the Rocks."' (Publication abstract)