1989

Selected Poems
Peter Bland

John McIndoe
1987, 79 pp.

Murray Bramwell

I was about fifteen when I first read Peter Bland. By some oversight his first collection, My Side of the Story, had found its way on to the shelves of my high school library. I presumed it be an oversight because nothing about my high school days led me to believe that such a subversive book of poems could ever have been knowingly put there. Here were these …

1989
DRAFT

My Gorgeous Life
Dame Edna Everage
Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Despite having become more global than ozone since her first appearance in 1956 (at the behest of playwright Ray Lawlor), Dame Edna Everage has rarely committed herself in print. Virtually silent on the page since the Coffee Table Book of 1976, her recently released memoir My Gorgeous Life candidly and caringly reveals details that have somehow escaped the tungsten glare of publicity in which she is perpetually …

Mars Peter Porter
Illustrated by Arthur Boyd
Andre Deutch

Mars, hoodlum son of Hera and Zeus, liked more than a malenky bit of ultra-violence, so the sources say, and Thracian deity that he was – the more gratuitous the better.

In Mars, Peter Porter, in his fourth collaborative volume with artist Arthur Boyd, has written his most pungent verses since Annotations of Auschwitz. Mars is a splenetic jeremiad against twentieth century warfare alongside which Boyd’s stumpy, perfunctorily daubed …

Book Reviewers’ Choice

Best reading for 1988 would have to include Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (King Penguin). It was turned into a sublime film by Bill Forsythe, but the novel, first published in 1981, is even sublimer. Beautifully written, eerie and strangely consoling, it is a rare work.

Julia Voznesenkaya’s The Women’s Decameron (Methuen) is a cycle of stories told by ten women quarantined in a present-day maternity hospital in Leningrad. The hundred stories tell, among other things, of First Love, …

On June 22 this year, Som Prakash was invigilating examinations at the University of South Pacific when the Fijian military authorities turned up and hauled him off to Queen Elizabeth barracks. Under the terms of the Internal Security Decree, the security forces can hold people in detention for periods of up to two years without explanation or trial.

The minister responsible for the Decree is Brigadier (he used to be Colonel before he promoted himself) Sitiveni Rabuka. The reasons given …

The Bonfire Of The vanities
By Tom Wolfe
Jonathan Cape

The Difference between the old journalism and the New (as Tom Wolfe himself called it) is that the New Journalism is writ large – in the Upper Case Apt Phrase – and writ often, with hyperactive syntax, repetitions of the key word and triple pause dots stringing together gauds of aphoristic wit.

So when it is announced that Tom Wolfe, an author of ten books which make the word best-seller …

The New Review Anthology
Edited by Ian Hamilton
Paladin

In 1968 Ian Hamilton edited a collection called The Modern Poet -Essays from The Review. It was a greatest hits from his little magazine of the Sixties which included commentary by Colin Falck, John Fuller, Hamilton himself writing on Robert Lowell (he was later to produce Lowell’s biography) and A.Alvarez, the firebrand of English criticism, breathing heavily against gentility and raising the literary stocks of Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and, …

Friendly Street Poetry Reader No.11.
Edited by Elaine Golding and
Peter McFarlane
Friendly St Poets, P.O. Box 79, Unley SA 5061

The Friendly St Reader is the official record of the Friendly St readings held at the Box Factory on the first Tuesday of every month. This is now the eleventh year of the readings, and the Reader, and it is further proof of the durability of this Adelaide phenomenon.

The first readings took place back in 1975 at the …