1991

A Common Prayer

Leunig

Collins Dove

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

For the past twenty years Michael Leunig has turned wisps and smudges of paint and ink into sublime visual comedy. His Franciscan bestiary of parrots, foxes, cats, small dogs and ducks have been ubiquitous since the days of the Nation Review and latterly as spirits of The Age. These creatures have followed stars in billycarts and given solace to the downcast humanity who mope and muse and wonder …

1991

A Common Prayer
Leunig
Collins Dove

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

For the past twenty years Michael Leunig has turned wisps and smudges of paint and ink into sublime visual comedy. His Franciscan bestiary of parrots, foxes, cats, small dogs and ducks have been ubiquitous since the days of the Nation Review and latterly as spirits of The Age. These creatures have followed stars in billycarts and given solace to the downcast humanity who mope and muse and wonder in …

1990

May Week Was in June
Clive James

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is something prodigal about Clive James’s writing. An expense of spirit, you might say, in a waste of shame. Prolific almost to a fault, he has not only produced twenty books, including two overcooked novels and half a dozen volumes of comic verse less Augustan than Dysgustan, he has also become a television monolith producing the kind of glib, pleased-with-itself instant editorialising that, as critic for The …

1990

Olivia Shakespear and W.B.Yeats
John Harwood
Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The reconstruction of any history is a gradual process and that of literary movements is no exception. The chronicling of Modernism has been a particularly baroque process. The key players were grandiose not only in mythologising themselves but in barracking for their chums as well. W.B.Yeats wrote himself into the Celtic dreamtime, Ezra Pound saw himself as Dante in a beret and T.S. Eliot smiled coyly while everyone …

1990

The Great World
David Malouf
Chatto and Windus

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Memories and the past have often been at the centre of David Malouf’s fiction- in his first novel Johnno, in the tellingly named An Imaginary Life, especially in the scrupulously recalled chambers of 12 Edmondstone Street and now in his most recent work, The Great World. The capacity to remember is more than nostalgic impulse for Malouf, it is the power to reconstitute and sustain glimpses from …

1990

Fly Away Peter
David Malouf

Poetic is the word most often used to describe David Malouf’s work. He started out as a poet and has published five volumes to date. He also taught in the English department at Sydney University – so it is hardly surprising to find a `literariness’ in his work which stylistically takes the form of a verbal compression that can make the apparent simplicity of his writing not so much difficult to penetrate, but unaccountably …

1990

Flinders University of South Australia
Centre for New Literatures in English
and the English Discipline

Notes for Teachers of English Studies

Fly Away Peter
by David Malouf
First published by Chatto and Windus, 1982.

The Novel

Fly Away Peter is set in Queensland just before 1914. It concerns two young men in contrasting circumstances. Ashley Crowther, after receiving an English public school and Cambridge education, has returned to manage the family estates that he has solely inherited. He leads …

1990

My Gorgeous Life
by Dame Edna Everage
Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Despite having become more global than ozone since her first appearance on December 13, 1955 (at the behest of playwright Ray Lawler) Edna Everage has rarely committed herself to print. Virtually silent on the page since the Coffee Table Book of 1976, her recently released memoir, My Gorgeous Life, candidly reveals details that have somehow escaped the tungsten glare of publicity in which she is perpetually bathed.…

1989

The Complete Book of Australian Verse
By John Clarke

Allen and Unwin/Haynes

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this book. This collection, which has manifest itself as if from nowhere, will have its reverberation wherever Australian letters are seriously read. It is as if poetry, having lost its Elgin marbles, has now found them. Curricula will be overturned, existing library holdings called into question and, I fear, distinguished reputations will topple. Even …

A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound
by Humphrey Carpenter,
Faber and Faber, 1989.

Ezra Pound has often stood as the quintessence of Modernism. Originating from Hailey, Idaho, in the American West, he presented himself as a cross between Dante and Uncle Remus, James McNeill Whistler and P. T. Barnum. Later, when the masks changed, or slipped altogether, the associations became sinister and unsavoury as his anti-Semitism ran riot and when, during World War II, he openly supported the …