Category: Blog

The Suitcase

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by Aashish Kaul Sergei Dovlatov’s comic masterpiece The Suitcase begins with the author’s brief, pathetic conversation with a clerk at the Russian Office of Visas and Registrations (the ‘bitch at OVIR’, he refers to her in anger), conducted in the course of pointless, exhausting formalities that were involved in emigrating from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Dovlatov describes this exchange with characteristic satirical flourish, an exchange essentially about the quota of suitcases allowed to an emigrant. ‘Only three suitcases? What am I suppose to do with all my things?’ But a week later, while packing, he finds that he needs just…

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Mum

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by Stephen Sewell My mother was the storyteller in our family. My mother and her sisters. They knew the truth and the secrets, as all women do, of births and deaths and the mystery in between. They knew the histories and could weave them into something that made sense, even when it didn’t. Not necessarily with a moral or a lesson, but conveying the peculiar contingency and strangeness of it all, the coincidences and odd juxtapositions that make us pause and wonder and grieve. I suppose that’s the overwhelming sense I have, what I got from them, the sadness and…

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Dad

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by Stephen Sewell My father was nearly killed in a motorbike accident a month after I was born.  When he finally came to, he couldn’t recognise me or my mother and didn’t know who he was. My Aunt Mary tried to tell him, but he didn’t know who she was, either. That was the first blow my parents received. My mother returned to factory work and with the help of her family and my father’s, principally Mary, but also my other aunts, they scraped through. He eventually came home, only to suffer what the doctors called a nervous breakdown that…

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Family

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by Stephen Sewell My father had six brothers and a sister. They had big families in those days, especially the Catholics. There were eight of them in all – Browny, Noel, Tom, Trowl, Barny, Harry, Mary and my father, the youngest, Jack.  Browny was the copper, a mounted policeman out at Condoblin, Tom was the thief who served time in gaol and died spitting and cursing in a sanitorium. He was a favourite of my father’s because of his tough-man talk and claims to knowing Darcy Dugan, a notorious gunman and escape merchant of the era. Sometimes Dad would look…

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Blood and Loss

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by Stephen Sewell I suppose I’ve been a writer all my life, and it’s always been getting me into trouble. I was nearly expelled from school when I was thirteen when the school paper I was editing began an investigation of the local parish priest, and my relationship with authority has been fraught ever since. It’s not that I’m a natural rebel, I don’t think, though most children are, but that I just can’t stand being pushed around. Fundamentally, that’s what it is. So maybe I just never grew up. Of course, I don’t like hypocrisy and can’t stand inconsistency,…

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James Dickey

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by Anthony Lawrence “What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.”                   James Dickey, Deliverance Watching Deliverance again after many years, waiting for the…

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Fireworks Below the River

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by Anthony Lawrence Swamp Riddles: Robert Adamson In 1978, my mother met me at the door and handed me a note, saying “This is what you have to do if you’re serious and want to be a real poet.” She had written a list that included: – read everything you can get your hands on – go to second hand bookshops and start a poetry collection – write every day – say no to your friends more often I assumed that while I’d been at work, she’d had a major epiphany about poetry, and was now passing on this crucial…

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Sharon Olds: The Regret of the Body

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by Anthony Lawrence Photo of Sharon Olds by Matt Valentine Sometime in 1990 I was at home in Geraldton, WA. I was at the kitchen table, writing. It was late morning. I heard a car pull up. The front gate creaked open, there were footsteps, a thump, and then a woman shouted: “Arsehole!” When I reached the screen door, I saw her striding away. She had dark hair and was wearing a white shirt and black pants. She got into her car and drove away. I looked around. Near the door was a cardboard box. I picked it up and…

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Ambition

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by Anthony Lawrence I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box. – from The Ambition Bird, Anne Sexton Ambition is normal. It’s the fuse we light when we begin. We want our poems to succeed, whatever that means. When we start out, it’s a good thing we don’t know how to file all the burrs down. Our early work, with its deep flaws and inconsistencies, is all we have. Self belief. Ambition. Faith. Trying to second-guess ourselves in the early stages kills the pilot light. Self-consciousness is the last thing…

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Paul Muldoon

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by Anthony Lawrence I thought I’d begin my Blog with a close reading from a small selection of Paul Muldoon’s poems. I consider him to be one of the major poets writing in English, and I’d like to share some thoughts on why his work has been so influential. Muldoon emerged, as did Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson and others, from Belfast into international prominence. The Belfast renaissance of the late 60’s produced a potent list of poets whose work would inspire generations and, in Muldoon’s case, many imitators. The story goes that when Muldoon,…

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Subject/ed?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau Perhaps the biggest reason for not knowing if we’re there yet, as discussed in the previous post, is that nobody is quite sure where there actually is. The development of literary modes / –isms / genres / forms tends, on the whole, to be reactive rather than proactive. That is to say, the writer does often work from the starting point of wanting to bring a unique method of expression into the public discourse, but this particularity is generally based on a movement away from a form of expression thought to have lost its currency. There…

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Are we there yet?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau About six weeks ago, I was tagged in a Facebook post by Australian author Shady Cosgrove asking various folk for ‘recommendations for essays that dissect what, exactly, constitutes Australian literature’. She was asking fellow academics and writers, yet other than some suggestions about what we don’t think Australian literature is, or should be, or what it used to be, the response, on the whole, was a fairly solid ‘dunno’.* As a sometime reviewer of Australian short stories, more so than novels, I could name a handful of stylistic devices that seem to crop up in volumes…

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