AustLit

Three new Ern Malley's were 'constructed' for the November 2005 issue of the electronic journal Cordite and new poems were published under each name. Cordite published the following description of this 2005 incarnation of the fictitious author of the 1940s: 'A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ern Malley cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness "where happiness happens to like its poems written best" (in his inordinate phrase).'

(Cordite no.23, 2005.)