Prize Pumpkins
An Inflection of Silence and Other Poems
Edited by Christopher Pollnitz
University of Newcastle Press

The viewless wings of poesy were never anybody’s idea of the way to make money. The rewards for writing poetry must certainly be in heaven because they are mighty scarce on earth. Writers may get grants and free board and lodging in universities from time to time but that is about the size of it.

So when poetry prizes are offered worth several …

The New From Ireland and Other Stories
William Trevor
Bodley Head

Amidst the profusion of new fiction and the apparently endless experimentation with narrative and structure the fiction of William Trevor can be, and for too many readers still is, overlooked as commonplace and, certainly, unfashionable.

That is not to say that Trevor has gone unregarded – King Penguin published his Collected Stories several years ago and numbers of his stories have_become memorable television plays- The General’s Day with the …

It always seems churlish to compare a writer’s new book unfavourably with earlier works and literary history is full of instances of apparently purblind hostility to writers who had left their own straight and narrow paths to experiment, enlarge their vision, chart new territory and so on. But it is also true that authors can become fixated on projects which serve their own needs more than that of any reader. Take Finnegan’s Wake for example- Joyce spent seventeen years and …

12 Edmondstone Street
By David Malouf
Chatto & Windus

David Malouf’s latest book, 12 Edmondstone Street is an interesting combination of memoir and personal history because it seeks to draw a distinction between the two. As memoir it recalls Malouf’s childhood in Brisbane as a second generation Australian of Lebanese descent growing up in the 1940s when a war had brought Australia face to face with the imperatives of identity and cultural and political choice. As personal history the book …

Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth
by Shiva Naipaul
Hamish Hamilton

Collections of occasional writings run the risk of being neither fish nor foul. They often represent the urgent efforts of publishers to keep a writer visible in the bookshops or, in some cases, they are the last crumbs and leavings of scholarly activity and posthumous money spinning.

Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth, Shiva Naipaul’s collection of stories, journalism and memoir provides by contrast, a lively insight into the Trinidadian born novelist. …