Review

Catherine McNamara, Pelt and other stories (Review)

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Catherine McNamara, PeltIt seems fitting that my first review of the year be for a book of short stories by one of this blog’s regular commenters, Catherine McNamara. I have reviewed McNamara before, her first published novel, The divorced lady’s companion to living in Italy. McNamara  describes that book as commercial fiction. It is, to describe it differently, chicklit for the mature woman – and is a fun read. However, Pelt and other stories is a different thing altogether. It represents, McNamara has said, where her real writing love is – literary short stories.

You will hear from Catherine herself soon in the form of an author interview on the blog, but by way of introduction now, she is an Aussie expat who left Australia as a student a couple of decades ago. She now lives in Italy but has lived in other parts of Europe and for several years Africa. All this is reflected in her stories which have Australian, European and African settings. As with many short story collections, several of the stories have been published elsewhere, on-line and in print. Her story “Coptic Bride” was published in Giramondo‘s now-defunct, but admired, literary magazine Heat.

The first thing to say about McNamara’s writing is that it is not spare. Her exuberant use of imagery reminds me at times of  the early writings of Thea Astley and another expat, Janette Turner Hospital, both writers who have reveled in colourful, figurative language, albeit to different purposes. Occasionally the imagery can feel a little overdone, but I love their freshness, love the risks McNamara takes. The next thing to say is that her subject matter tends to revolve around sex. The book is, after all, subtitled “tales of lust and dirt”. In McNamara’s work, sexual passion represents the best and worst of what life has to offer. And, given that there’s more drama in the worst or the problematic, it is this – in the form of violence, incest, jealousy and infidelity – that we mostly find in Pelt and other stories. Thirdly, McNamara mixes up her narrative voice. She uses first and third person, and she writes in a variety of voices, including, for example, a white gay male and a black female. This keeps you on your toes. You never know who the next characters will be, and where they’ll be from. I like that.

While Pelt and other stories is a collection, several stories are connected, which makes the order of the stories particularly interesting. I suspect ordering stories in a collection, which I discussed briefly in my review of Knitting and other stories, is one of the trials of preparing a short story collection (or anthology). Do you match or contrast tone or themes? Do you put related stories together? The truth is that it probably matters less to the reader than the writer/editor thinks, as readers will often pick and choose. However, with single-author collections, my practice is to read, from the beginning, in the order presented. And this is where the fun started with Pelt and other stories. There are, for example, sly connections in which a character – Nathalie for example – is an important subject in one story (“Nathalie”), but then appears as a passing reference elsewhere. Other stories have stronger connections. I was particularly intrigued by McNamara’s presentation of three of these – “Opaque”, “Where the wounded go” and “Volta”. They don’t appear consecutively, and when they do appear it is not chronological. I’m not sure what McNamara’s intention was in this, but for me it replicates the way we get to know people. We meet them at a point in time, getting to know their current lives, while gradually learning their back story. In a collection that ranges widely in character and location, the connections can be grounding.

What I particularly like about the stories is their honesty. McNamara doesn’t flinch from letting her characters express their (our) meanest, least generous thoughts. Love, McNamara shows, can make us selfish, desperate, and sometimes cruel. In the first story, “Pelt”, the animality of lust is palpable as a pregnant black mistress stands her ground, fighting for her rather weak, German lover against his barren wife. Many of her stories are about compromised relationships and the accommodations made, by one or both parties, to keep them going. “The Coptic Bride” is one of these, as is “Opaque” in which a woman’s love for her man is tested against her sense of morality, of what is right:

But if she called, it would perforate all that she held close to her. It would cost her her life.

Do you think she made that call?

awwchallenge2014These are unsettling stories about characters struggling to survive in a precarious world. Europe’s colonisation of Africa shadows the book. Many of the relationships are mixed, and in most stories there is power imbalance, and hints of exploitation. It’s there in “Pelt”. In “Janet and the Angry Trees” a sex-worker is taken to her Italian lover’s family home to look after his parents, and seems to accept the pittance of attention she gets from her still-married lover. It’s in the little piece “Innocent” about a taxi driver, his white employer and his pregnant teenage girlfriend, and in “Infection” in which a brother receives a western education while his sister “received no education, cursory love, much admonishment”. There’s a suggestion in some stories of stereotyping – you know, the lusty, sensual black woman and the unfaithful white man looking for “a bit” on the side – but the relationships are more complex than that. Overall, I’d say that the stories are more about humanity than about politics, while recognising that politics has contributed to the uncertainty of the world the characters inhabit.

A recurring motif in the book is the photographer. McNamara seems to view photographers with suspicion. At least they tend not to be the most admirable characters in the stories in which they appear. They represent the disconnect between appearance and reality, and perhaps also the idea of exploitation. In “Gorgeous Eyes”, the narrator views photographs by the visiting famous photographer, Nina Cooke, seeing the truth behind the idealised images of “Dinka men – erotic in beaded body corsets”. He reflects that those in the know see something else, “a crucible of sadness”, in these images and concludes:

If Nina Cooke’s gift ever needed an honest name it would be the invasive branding of humble detail. It appears she is at the vanguard of a vulgar world trait.

These stories are not comfortable reading. Some make more sense to me than others. But McNamara’s voice is strong, her writing lively and her characters real. Pelt and other stories will linger with me for some time.

Catherine McNamara
Pelt and other stories: Tales of lust and dirt
Beaworthy: Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2013
204pp.
ISBN: 9781909357099

(Review copy courtesy the author)

Linda Jaivin, Found in translation: In praise of a plural world (Review)

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Linda Jaivin, Found in translation Book cover

Courtesy: Black Inc

Reading synchronicity strikes again! In the last couple of months, the issue of language, translation and culture has been crossing my path – in Diego Marani‘s The last of the Vostyachs, in Gabrielle Gouch’s Once, only the swallows were free, and on Lisa’s blog post about the AALITRA Symposium on Translation. I was consequently more than happy to accept a review copy of the latest Quarterly Essay, Linda Jaivin’s Found in translation.

Now, as some of you know, I have mixed feelings about reading books in translation. I want to read them because I want to read not just about but from other cultures. Not being fluent in all the languages of the world, the only way I can do this is to read works in translation, but when I read a translated work I am very conscious that there is a mediator between me and the work. This bothers me. Linda Jaivin, herself a translator, knows exactly what I mean:

… it is absurd to speak of issues of literary style, rhythm – or any aspect of a translated work aside from its structure, characters and plot – without acknowledging that the language of the text is at once a creation of the translator and an interpretation of the author …

And she gives good examples to support her statement. I was pleased to see her acknowledge this, because she knows of what she speaks! But, this little point is only a very small part of Jaivin’s wide-ranging, entertaining but also passionate essay. Jaivin, if you haven’t heard of her, is a multi-skilled woman: she subtitles Chinese film and television and translates Chinese text; she has worked as an interpreter; and she has written novels, stories, plays and essays.

As a reader and lover of words, I enjoyed Jaivin’s discussion of the technical and philosophical challenges faced by translators. She peppers her discussion with an eclectic but fascinating array of examples. And she quotes other translators, such as Edith Grossman who wrote that

a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation … no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly.

Take swearing for example. How we swear is highly cultural. Swear words, Jaivin writes, “expose what is forbidden, what is permitted and what is held sacred” in a culture, and consequently “can  throw differences in worldviews into sharp relief”. However, you’ll have to read the essay, if you want to see her examples!

I was intrigued by her argument that translations of classics go out of date! So, this means that the Spanish will always read the same Don Quixote but English speakers are very likely to read a different translation depending on which one is currently in vogue.

“… a culture doesn’t grow just by talking to itself …”

But, the critical point of her essay is not the act of translation. As the title of her essay implies, Jaivin is passionate about pluralism, and more, about cosmopolitanism. By this, she means not just living side by side, not just accepting each other, but “sharing a common vision”.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeFor Jaivin, “translation” is not a narrow concept. Its implications extend far beyond the “simple” translation of words from one language to another, because attached to language are meanings and ideas. When ideas are translated – via words – from one culture to another those ideas change. Jaivin describes how concepts such as Confucianism and yes, even democracy, change when they cross cultures. This can lead, she says, to misunderstanding but it can also provide “room for the kind of creative interpretation that allows cultures and the conversations between them to grow and evolve”.

She argues that, because of Australia’s particular history and geography, and because Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in Australia after English, “Australia is … in a unique position to translate the shift from the ‘American century’ to the ‘Asian one’ …”.

Building successful international relationships, she believes, requires genuine communication, which includes knowing, recognising and respecting other languages. It

does not require the weak to adopt the language of the strong – as reliance on English threatens to do, given its global and frequently imperial reach.

Jaivin argues that learning a foreign language should be a compulsory part of year 12 and university education, because “we need to have every possible line of communication open to us” if we are to successfully traverse the changes coming.  Not everyone agrees. What do you think?

Linda Jaivin
“Found in translation: In praise of a plural world”
in Quarterly Essay, No. 52
Collingwood: Black Inc, November 2013
103pp.
ISBN: 9781863956307

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc.)

Gabrielle Gouch, Once, only the swallows were free (Review)

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Gabrielle Gouch, Once, only swallows were free

Courtesy: Hybrid Publishers

Do you differentiate memoir from autobiography? I do. For me, a memoir, such as Gabrielle Gouch’s Once, only the swallows were free, deals with a specific aspect of a person’s life, such as a sportsman writing about his career when he retires from it or a person writing about her growing up, like, say, Alice Pung‘s Unpolished gem. An autobiography, on the other hand, I see as something more holistic, something written near the end of one’s life and summing up its entirety. What do you think?

Gabrielle Gouch was born in Transylvania, Romania to parents who’d both fled anti-Semitic Hungary. She moved elsewhere in Romania with her family before they emigrated to Israel, without her older half-brother, when she was around 20. A few years later, she emigrated on her own to Australia which has remained her home ever since. This is the basic chronology of her life, but Gouch is not really interested in telling us this story chronologically – and in fact, she’s not really interested in telling us the story of her life. What interests her is the brother, Tom, left behind. She wants to know about his life during and post communism in Romania. She also wants to know about the gaps in her knowledge of the family.

Gouch therefore doesn’t tell the story in a simple chronology. While she clearly signposts where you are as you read, I found it a little disconcerting to start with, until I felt familiar with the places and people she was writing about. This, however, could be due to other things going on in my life as I started this book. The memoir starts in 1990 with her first return to Transylvania after “the collapse of communism. The eternal and invincible communism”. A return that took place 25 years after she had left. As the book progresses, she visits Cluj several times, catching up with her brother, learning about her family. It’s a sad story – not surprisingly. Tom’s mother, the much beloved, vivacious Hella, died in childbirth. His – and eventually Gabrielle’s – father, Stefan, married the nanny, refugee Roza, hired in to look after the physically handicapped Tom. (As far as I can tell, his condition is hemiplegia, probably caused by the forceps birth). Roza and Stefan went on to have two children – Gabrielle and, somewhat later, Yossi – but country girl Roza was never accepted by Stefan’s well-to-do family.

The book proper starts in 1962 with the family expecting permission to migrate to Israel to arrive any minute. Of course, it doesn’t – and it is not until some 40 or so pages and three years later that they are finally able to leave. They leave without Tom, now well into his twenties, but exactly why this is so is not understood by Gouch. During the course of the book she finds out why – and she finds out what Tom’s life was like under the communist regime. It’s a very interesting story, and once you master the time shifts across the book’s seven parts, it’s a very readable one. The very short Part 2, for example, returns to the opening of the book, her return in 1990. Then Part 3 jumps to 2002 and another trip of hers “home”. From then on the focus is her time with Tom and the stories she gradually pieces together.

Gouch is a good writer. Her language is expressive, but not over-done. That is, she has some lovely turns of phrase that capture moments and people well. Here, for example, she describes her family’s reaction when her mother says something surprising:

We looked at her as if she had made her way into our home by the back door somehow, a woman we had never met before.

And I like this simple description of children:

Well, children are like shares, you never know how they will turn out.

There are two main threads in the book, one being life under communism, as experienced by Tom, and the other being the life of the emigrant, as experienced by her family. The book is enlightening for people interested in either of these topics, but I’m going to highlight the second, the emigrant’s life, because she explains it beautifully – from the tough life her parents experienced in Israel to her own experience of dislocation from culture. She writes, as she starts to reconnect with her brother:

Noone ever told me that you cannot turn physical distance into emotional one, you cannot forget your native country, you cannot give up your mother tongue. It deadens you inside.

She gives one of the best descriptions of the relationship of language to culture that I have read. She meets an old professor who had chosen to stay living under the repressive regime because, he said, “This is my native land, my language. I belong here.” She writes:

His words lingered. ‘My native land, my language.’ For most people, the sound of Hungarian is awkward; for me it is poetry and delight. When I say ‘flower’ in English I refer to a plant with petals and colours. But the word in Hungarian, virág, sounds to me melodious and joyful. Yes, you can learn to speak a language, you can even learn to think in a language but will you feel the same joy and sadness at the sound of those words? Feel the black desperation or be uplifted by hope? Will the word love evoke the same tenderness and ardour? I don’t think so.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeGouch also writes about “history”, about the impact on people of living through some of history’s trickiest times, as her family had. Her description of her father’s life – a loving father who had worked hard – is heart-rending:

A man who was a Jew but not Jewish enough, an Israeli but not quite, a Hungarian Jew among Romanians and a Jew among Hungarians. Finally he left this world with its divisive nationalisms, ideologies and religions which had marred most of his life. He was just another man on whom history had inflicted its painful and murderous pursuits: Nazism, the Second World War, the communist dictatorship, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli religiosity. History had match-made him, history had controlled his life. It was over. He joined the infinite Universe.

I’ve possibly quoted too much, but Gouch’s words are powerful and worth sharing.

“Knowledge”, Gouch’s father once told her, “is your only possession”. Once, only the swallows were free is a story of discovery for Gouch, but for us, it provides a window into a particular place, time and experience that most of us know little about. The knowledge, the understanding, we gain from reading it is a precious thing.

Gabrielle Gouch
Once, only the swallows were free: A memoir
Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2013
279pp.
ISBN: 9781921665998

(Review copy supplied by Hybrid Publishers)

Melissa Lucashenko, Sinking below sight (Review)

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In this week’s Monday Musings about the Walkley Awards, I noted that Melissa Lucashenko had won the award for Long Feature Writing for her essay “Sinking below sight: Down and out in Brisbane and Logan” in the Griffith Review. I’ve now read the essay, and thought I’d share it with you. I’ve reviewed Lucashenko before, an essay and a short story. I really must get to one of her novels one day!

With her mixed European and indigenous Australian heritage, Lucashenko is well placed to tackle significant contemporary issues and see them from multiple perspectives. The last essay of hers that I reviewed, “How green is my valley”, dealt with stewardship of the land and the threat imposed by climate change. In “Sinking below sight” her subject is poverty. Lucashenko’s essays make engaging reading. Instead of dry reportage, she starts from the personal, and from that draws conclusions that make sense. And so, while “How green is my valley” drew from her experience on a farm in northern New South Wales, this essay draws from her return, after losing her farm through divorce, to the town of Logan, one of Australia’s ten poorest urban areas.

You’ve probably noticed that her subtitle alludes to Orwell’s autobiographical work Down and out in Paris and London which chronicles his experience of poverty. Similarly, Lucashenko writes that she’s been poor before, so “I had the skill set”. But, this essay is not about her. She starts by setting the scene, describing this “Black Belt” region as one in which

Welfare recipients and the working poor … don’t necessarily realise they are hard up. More accurately, many don’t realise just how poor they are, since everyone in their lives is battling.

She then moves on to the main topic of her essay, which is to find out “How do my Black Belt peers manage? How do single mums, in particular, get by on current levels of welfare? And what dreams are possible for the Brisbane underclass in 2013?” To answer this interviews three women currently living in poverty – Selma (27), Marie (38) and Charmaine (49) – and discusses their situations.

Selma, a Yugoslavian of Serbian and Croatian parents, has four children under ten and a partner who is in and out of jail. Having been a refugee and then involved with an abusive Aboriginal man, Selma has some clear views on her situation:

What I don’t like in society … is the judgments put on Indigenous and refugee and domestic violence people. I was in that situation for nine years. They say you make a choice, but I don’t ever remember choosing to be beaten up! From the age of seventeen ’til about two years ago, domestic violence was part of my everyday life.

She blames poverty for violence, saying that “poverty breeds hate”. Lucashenko suggests that the abuse she experienced “had roots also in the trauma and racism of the refugee experience.”

Marie is also a mother of four, with an “on-again, off-again partner”. She is a member of the “working poor” so not quite as poor as Selma. She grew up in a troubled home, had been sexually molested as a child, and was living independently by the time she was 14 years old. She, like Selma, had a history of “severe emotional and physical abuse from her previous partners, who were all, bar one, Anglo-Australian men”. Lucashenko writes:

Marie spoke to me of feeling enormous rage about the past abuses in her life, rage which sits constantly just beneath the surface.

The third woman is Charmaine, “blond, slim and still able to laugh despite a life that would crush most of us [and] the white Australian mother of four Aboriginal kids”. She too was raped and molested as a child, and ended up in a violent relationship in which she stayed too long.

Australian Women Writers Challenge

While recognising that her examples are more anecdotal than statistical, Lucashenko nonetheless draws some conclusions. They include:

  • Underclass expectations, which see people who grow up with nothing, expecting little
  • The importance of public housing in providing some “minimal prospect of safety”
  • Loneliness and isolation, which drive single mums back to “untenable situations”
  • Violence and mental illness in parents and partners, which entrench poverty for women
  • Childhood molestation and/or rape, which all three women had experienced
  • Women seeking relief in drugs, which of course can initiate new downward trajectories

Her three women, Lucashenko finds, have hopes for the future. Selma and Charmaine are studying, because, as Lucashenko writes

Realising that poverty is a creation of society and its choices, these two women also know that their lives might shift through higher education.

Pragmatic Marie has a saving plan. Their situations though are tenuous. To achieve their goals, they’ll need strength. Better still, though, would be if they got effective financial and other practical support.

Lucashenko opens the essay with the epigraph that “the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. It’s justice”. Her essay may not be statistically significant from an academic perspective, but anyone who reads contemporary social commentary knows that what she writes rings true – and this, clearly, is why she won the Walkley.

Melissa Lucashenko
“Sinking below sight”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 41, 2013
Available: Online at the Griffith Review

Russell Drysdale at Tarra Warra

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English: Photograph of Australian painter Russ...

Russell Drysdale with canvases, 1945 (Photo by Max Dupain. Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

If you’d asked me to name an Australian artist when I was young, two names would have popped into my head – Russell Drysdale and the indigenous artist Albert Namatjira. As I grew up, other names came to the fore, such as William Dobell, Sidney Nolan, Margaret Olley, Margaret Preston, Jeffrey Smart, and Brett Whiteley, not to mention newer indigenous artists like Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarreye. Russell Drysdale, in fact, disappeared a little from view – at least, I stopped hearing him mentioned. So, when I discovered recently, via Lisa of ANZLitLovers, that the Tarra Warra Museum of Art in Victoria was having a Russell Drysdale exhibition on the theme Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, I knew I wanted to see it. Fortunately, we had a trip planned to Melbourne during the exhibition. Guess where I went this week!

The thing I have always liked about Drysdale (1912-1981) is that the paintings I knew were simple – in the stark sense, not in the meaning sense! This starkness equates, for me anyhow, with the spare in writing – and regular readers here know that I like the spare. I love the fact that paintings that look simple or easy to comprehend contain layers of feelings and ideas that only become evident if you spend time looking at them. But, of course, as usually happens with exhibitions of an artist’s oeuvre, I learnt things I hadn’t known in my simple (and here I mean simple in terms of understanding) youth. Here are some of those things* …

Drysdale’s early landscapes were rejected by the Modernists

Apparently, the Melbourne Modernists didn’t think landscape was a proper subject for art – despite the fact that Drysdale’s landscapes, particularly those from 1940-1941 when the criticisms were made, were not pretty or simplistically representational. One of his artistic influences was Modigliani, which is obvious in the elongated figures he painted into his landscapes in the 1940s, such as his 1941 “Man feeding his dogs”.

As time progressed, however, his images became redder, starker and darker – and yet, the exhibition tells us, he wrote in 1956:

The vast spaces of the north, endless and old. It’s very hard to reorient oneself. Outside the traffic rushes by as in every city. The hurrying crowd, dressed and neat, and rain splashing on the roads. Neon lights and no stars; but the loneliness of the desert plains seems friendly, and infinitely peaceful. (Drysdale’s journal, 13/10/56)

Friendliness and peacefulness are not, I think, the usual feelings you take from his outback paintings. There is certainly the loneliness, but alongside it is a sense of the hardness of the life, of resignation, and, more positively, of resilience. But, there is also, from the painter, a sense of respect and affection. I found, via Google, an oral history interview he did with Hazel de Berg in 1960, in which he said of the landscape:

It is an environment which I love and which I like to go back to, and for me it has a tremendous appeal, it is continually exciting, these curious and strange rhythms which one discovers in a vast landscape, the juxtaposition of figures, of objects, all these things are exciting. Add to that again the peculiarity of the particular land in which we live here, and you get a quality of strangeness that you do not find, I think, anywhere else. This is very ancient land, and its forms and its general psychology are so intriguing as compared to the other countries of the world that it in itself is surprising.

I wonder what Murray Bail would say about this?

Drysdale was rejected for war service

Drysdale had a detached retina from his teens, which left him essentially blind in one eye and hence unfit for war service, so he (unofficially) contributed to the war effort through his paintings. During the Sydney Harbour submarine scare of 1942 he moved to the safety of Albury. His paintings at this time included soldiers on the Albury station platform. I had not seen these paintings before and found them particularly moving – dark, somewhat disproportionate figures that look weary but resigned. There’s “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” sense about them. (See Soldiers, Albury Station, 1942.)

Drysdale was concerned about environmental degradation

In 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald commissioned Drysdale and a reporter to record the effects of the severe drought that was occurring in western New South Wales. His drawings of dead trees and animals, eroded landscapes, and tired people were printed in the newspaper, and brought him to wider public attention. The exhibition included reproductions of these newspapers. Newsprint is not the ideal medium for such works, but you could still see the power of his feelings about what was happening to the land and the people. The works (paintings and drawings) that came out of this time include somewhat Dali-like surreal but also grotesquely anthropomorphised trees.

He went on in the late 1940s to paint scenes from the old gold mining towns of Hill End and Sofala. The exhibition notes talk of his depicting the impact of “bad farming, reckless mining and unrestrained civic expansion”.

One of the most famous paintings which comes from his Hill End-Sofala period, The Cricketers (1948), is in the exhibition. Its depiction of cricket players dwarfed by stark buildings in a destitute landscape is not the usual way this subject is rendered.

Drysdale was one of the first modern Australian artists to paint indigenous Australians

The exhibition included a few paintings from the 1950s to 1970s which depict Aboriginal people. The exhibition notes describe his concern and empathy for Aboriginal people, for the way they’d been “relegated to the margins”. The notes explained that he first depicted them in the traditional “white settler view of forlorn people”, but then moved to showing them as “silent figures standing in their country” and finally onto a more “abstract representation of their mystic connection beyond the material world”.

One of the strongest paintings from this period in the exhibition, and one of my favourites, is “Bob and Maudie” (1972).

I’m going to finish on a quote that was not in the exhibition, but that I can’t resist. It comes from his longstanding friend, artist Donald Friend. Friend wrote:

He loved gaiety and wild talk and drink, laughter, companionship. Everything, in fact, that was unlike those superb sad empty pictures he made in which a town was an empty street, a pub was one bored man leaning against a verandah post.

Well, he was, like me, the Aquarian – the escapist who could disappear into other shapes…

It’s interesting – the notion of escaping into darker reaches – but Drysdale isn’t the only person to do that, is he.

* Unfortunately, because Drysdale died in 1981, his paintings are still in copyright and so I can’t include any here. However, a Google Images search on his name will retrieve many examples.

Diego Marani, The last of the Vostyachs (Review)

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Italian writer Diego Marani‘s The last of the Vostyachs was originally published in 2002, but the English translation was not published until 10 years later in 2012. How lucky we are that it was, because this book is unlikely to have been written by an English-language writer. Its focus on the relationship between language, culture and place and on darker issues like ethnic nationalism comes from a different – and particularly European – sensibility. We speakers of the world’s dominant language can, I think, be a bit oblivious to the linguistic issues faced by speakers of other languages, particularly in Europe where multiple languages live cheek by jowl. The challenge of communication is an important issue for Marani who works in Brussels for the European Union. His roles have included interpreter, translator, and policy adviser on multilingualism. Marani knows as well as anyone that language is both a cultural and political issue – and this is what he explores in this, his second novel.

However, The last of the Vostyachs is no dry tome explicating the role and value of language. Instead it is a surprising and often funny novel that weaves myth and saga, melodrama and irony through the warp of a crime thriller. It incorporates a number of literary traditions and archetypes: the wild (innocent) man set loose in the city, the spurned wife, the spirit guide, the corrupt obsessive, and the remote cottage in the woods where dastardly things happen. On the night the crimes (murders, in fact) take place, nature runs amok. Zoo animals roam the city and the temperature drops to its coldest in fifty years.

The plot centres on Ivan, who is the last of the Vostyachs, an ancient Siberian shamanic tribe. He is the only one who can speak the language, though at the novel’s opening he had not spoken it (or anything else) for twenty years, not since, as a young boy in the gulag, he’d seen his father killed. When the gulag is suddenly freed, he returns to the Byrranga Mountains but all he finds are wolves. He believes them to be his people who, to flee the soldiers, had hidden deep in caves and turned into wolves. He cannot bring them back to human form but they shadow and protect him.

Every single language is necessary to keep the universe alive

Into this mix appears the plain, ethical, Russian linguist Olga who is excited to find a speaker of a language thought to have been extinct and who sees in this language an exciting connection between Europeans and the native Americans. Her old colleague, the womanising, unethical, Finnish linguist Jarmo Aurtova is not so pleased with this threat to his theory of Finnish as the “Latin of the Baltic”, as, in effect, the master language of Europe. Jarmo sounds scarily like Hitler in his desire to prove the supremacy of a pure Finnish language:

In ancient times we were the civilised ones and they were the barbarians. We were the masters, they were the slaves. Not for nothing is the word aryan so similar to the Finnic orja, which means slave.

and

But now ‘someone’ was trying to throw Finland into the dustbin of history, together with the other conquered peoples who have no future. Aurtova was not having that …

Jarmo cares not if a language or two disappears and dies in the service of his theory. He believes that the fewer the languages the more “we’re moving towards the truth, towards the pure language”, while for Olga “with each one that dies, a little truth dies with it”. Marani, the creator of the flexible inclusive language Europanto, is on Olga’s side, on the side of plurality. She says

The true meaning of things is hidden from us; it lies beyond the bounds of any one language, and everyone tries to arrive at it with their own imperfect words. But no language can do this on its own. Every single language is necessary to keep the universe alive.

Cherish ignorance

The last of the Vostyachs is a ripping yarn that takes us from the tundra to Helsinki, through city streets, down country roads, across ice and onto the sea, as the various characters pursue their passions. But it’s the irony that conveys its main messages – and much of this irony revolves around our arch-villain and misogynst, Jarmo. His guilt as a murderer is revealed through a clue that is gorgeously ironic. In his final speech to the linguistic congress he, an academic for heaven’s sake, exhorts people to “cherish ignorance”, to not learn other people’s languages but “force” them to learn yours. And, most ironic of all, not only is the Vostyach language not destroyed, but by the end of the book, without giving too much away, “it could truly be said to be alive and flourishing” – albeit in a rather odd place.

Partway through the novel, Olga says to Jarmo of Finns that “to communicate with the rest of the world you have to learn another one, you have to venture out among words which are not your own, which you have borrowed from others”. In The last of the Vostyachs, Marani has ventured out and written something wild and rather risky. In doing so, he has produced a novel that’s not only fun to read but also gives the mind much to think about.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers read and enjoyed this book earlier this year.

Diego Marani
The last of the Vostyachs
(Trans. by Judith Landry)
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
176pp.
ISBN: 978192196885 (Kindle ed.)

Richard Rossiter (ed), Knitting and other stories (Review)

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Richard Rossiter, Knitting

Courtesy: Margaret River Press

Short stories, I’ve decided, are the ideal reading matter for breakfast, so for the last couple of weeks I’ve been engrossed in Knitting and other stories, which contains a selection of stories from this year’s Margaret River Short Story Competition. The competition is new, having been offered for the first time last year. According to the Margaret River Press’s website, there were 260 entries. This book contains 24 of them, including of course the winner and runner-up, and four highly commendeds.

The collection takes its title from the winning story, Knitting, by Barry Divola. Divola is one of the only two names I recognise in the book, the other being Jacqueline Wright whose first novel, Red dirt talking, was published last year. Knitting is a rather apposite title because most of the stories are about characters whose lives are unravelling – or have unravelled – in some way. And not all manage, by the end of their stories, to knit themselves together again, which is realistic even if it makes us readers feel a little unravelled ourselves!

As I was reading the stories a few things became apparent. Most of them are by women (20 of the 24 in fact). Does this represent the gender ratio of stories entered? Not that it matters, but it’s interesting, partly because it also means that, with a few gender-crossing exceptions, most of the stories focus on women. I noticed some recurring themes, about which I’ll write more below. And, I became aware, through connections between theme, character and/or setting, that the order of the stories had been crafted. Rossiter’s introduction, which I read after finishing the book, clarified that he had indeed grouped stories together. I think it enhanced the reading. There is always a jolt when you move from story to story, particularly if you read them without a break. Grouping them not only lessens the jolt but somehow encourages the brain to think beyond the immediate story. Karen Lee Thompson who has also reviewed this book feels quite differently about “contrived” ordering.

Another thing I noticed was that the majority of the stories seemed to be told in first person. Fifteen of them in fact. One is told in second person, making eight in third person. Does this matter? Probably not. First person can provide a level of intimacy that you don’t quite get with the other voices and I enjoy that. But, when you read one after another, no matter how well written they are, all the I, I, I can feel a bit tedious, a bit self-involved. This is not a comment on the individual stories so much as on the impact of the whole. Fortunately there are some lovely third person stories in this collection to break up the I-ness! And Amanda Clarke, in “The girl on the train”, uses the second person effectively to convey the dissociation experienced by a woman grieving over her daughter’s death. Describing her grief as “a vicious sort of cling wrap”, she is both trapped in and standing apart from herself. The “you” voice captures this beautifully.

Now to that old problem of how best to review a collection. For this one, I think the best approach is through its themes, and I’ll start with the one that stood out for me – grief, grief for people who have died, or for broken relationships or lost opportunities. Kristen Levitzke’s “Solomon’s Baby” about a baby’s death is particularly wrenching, but there are stories about grandchildren and grandparents (Vahri’s “I shine, not burn” and Louise D’Arcy’s “Down on the farm”) and people grieving for lost time and opportunities (Jacqueline Winn’s “The bitter end”), to name just a few.  Other recurring themes are memory, growing up, ageing and, either explicitly or implicitly, time. Jacqueline Winn’s “The bitter end” starts:

Let’s not fool ourselves, time is not something to be negotiated. Time passes through us or we pass through time. No second thoughts, no second chances.

Family and family relationships are common subjects. In many stories, a parent is missing – either through death, or separation – creating a gap that can have lasting ramifications. One of my favourite stories in the collection is JS Scholz’s “Focus” about a young boy who’s on the run with his mother from his abusive father. Seen as a “hopeless” student who can’t “focus”, he uses his initiative to carry out a subversive action which shows his true character. In another favourite story, Kathy’s George’s cleverly named “A bend in the road”, the temporary absence of the father creates a tension between a mother and son. The daughter, though, sees the real issue:

“The family is a board game, a game with a missing piece … and nobody can play the game without the missing piece. Not properly anyhow.”

In some stories, it’s the chance meeting of strangers which throws light on the protagonists’ situations. Amanda Clarke’s second-person-story is one of these. In Kerry Lown Whalen’s “Notes in a scale” and Bindy Pritchard’s “The bees of Paris” the strangers are also neighbours.

While most stories are about character and family relationships, not all are. One such is John Dale’s “Expressway” which satirises the need to believe. It’s the story of a smudge on the wall of the Cahill Expressway which Francesca Lombardo believes is an image of the Virgin Mary. This sets in train a series of events including the removal of the section of the wall to Darling Harbour “which had better facilities and all day parking”. The government, talk shows, scientists, and social media are all targeted in this fun but pointed story about, at best, our desire for miracles and, at worst, our gullibility.

There is some lovely writing here, but I’ll just share two short examples. Dorothy Simmons describes the bush in her story, “Off the map”, about a young girl who is an orienteering champion:

All the little movements: lizard flicker, goanna slither, leaf rustle, sleek silvery trees posing beside slouching shaggy grey ones; cicada hum, magpie trill, whip bird …

The other is Paulette Gittins’ description in “Playing with Ramirez” of a gang of children coming down a Melbourne suburban street:

Down the street towards me a vaulting, whooping gang in stripes, red and black, blue and white, shrilling, colliding, hilarious; black-haired, scrawny, curly and nimble, they poured past.

As with any collection, some stories touched me more than others, but all have something to offer, something to say, about living and surviving in a world that for many, as Divola writes in the title story, “is too sharp [with] edges everywhere”. A most enjoyable read.

For other reviews of this collection which highlight some different stories, check out Karen Lee Thompson (in her review mentioned above) and Anne Skivington.

Richard Rossiter (Ed)
Knitting and other stories: Margaret River Short Story Competition 2013
Witchcliffe: Margaret River Press, 2013
319pp.
ISBN: 9780987218087

(Review copy supplied by Margaret River Press)

Bill McKibben, Oil and honey (Review)

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Bill McKibben, Oil and Honey

Courtesy: Black Inc

It’s coincidental, but nicely appropriate, that the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) published its Provisional Statement on the Status of the Climate in 2013 last week, just as I was finishing US environmental activist Bill McKibben‘s latest book, Oil and honey: The education of an unlikely activist. It’s likewise coincidental that, three days before WMO’s announcement, Stefanie (of So Many Books) published a post titled Gardening for Climate Change* containing her thoughts on her garden and how climate change might affect it.

WMO’s statement says, among other things, that “During the first nine months of 2013, most of the world’s land areas had above-average temperatures, most notably in Australia, northern North America …”. As you know, I live in Australia; Bill McKibben and Stefanie live in the northern part of the USA. We are seeing (feeling) the changes, and are concerned. What I’m going to say next is pretty obvious, but I’m going to say it anyhow because I always like to start with the basics in discussions like this. There are two critical issues in the climate change debate: Is the climate changing and, if it is, Is it human-caused? It’s hard to imagine, given all the data available, that there’s anyone out there who really believes the climate is not changing, though I believe there are still some who think it’s simply a case of “climate variability”. These people think that the climate will get back to normal (some year soon, they hope). The trickier issue, however, is the causal one. Most of the deniers are not so much denying that the climate is changing, but that we are causing it. This brings me to Bill McKibben.

McKibben does not, in Oil and honey, spend time trying to prove that humans are causing climate change. For him it’s a given. Rather, he shares how he changed from being an environmentalist, who researched and wrote books, to an environmental activist who campaigns (and writes books). It’s an interesting, clearly written book about one man and his path, but can also be read as a how-to for those who want to get active.

You may now, though, be wondering about the title. Oil and honey? I’m sure there’s an ironic allusion here to the biblical “land of milk and honey” (which we are not heading towards), but there is also a literal meaning to the title. The narrative shifts pretty seamlessly between his two main passions. One is to do with bees, honey and good farming practice. The other is oil, or the fossil fuel industry, and how to stop its impact on the climate. Oil and honey, climate and farming. It’s all related.

You may also be wondering, particularly if you’re not American, who Bill McKibben is. As the blurb on the back of my edition says, he has written over a dozen books including the New York Times bestselling Eaarth and The end of nature. He also founded the environmental organisation 350.org and “was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming”. Despite all this, he did not until recently see himself as an activist. After graduating, he worked as a journalist for The New Yorker for five years, but quit in 1987 when its long-term editor was forced out of his job. Since then he has been a freelance writer.

Oil and honey is his latest book. I’d call it part-memoir part-manifesto, because it is both the personal story of his transition to full-blown activism and the story of his passion for saving the planet. The personal aspect of the book helps make it a good read. We get to understand his thinking, we feel his anxiety about becoming not only an activist but a leader of activists, and we learn that his activist philosophy is inspired by the non-violent resistance ideas of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. We see his love for nature and for working close to the land on the bee-farm he bought for his friend Kirk Webster to run. This farm functions both as respite and as a place for him to see land stewardship working.

That’s the memoir aspect. In the manifesto aspect, he shares with us the development of his ideas and strategies. We learn of various campaigns he has been involved in since 2009, including Step It Up, Keystone XL,  Do the Math. And he explains how he and his co-activists have shifted from focusing on politics and politicians – through such activities as sit-ins at the White House and lobbying politicians – to directly tackling the fossil fuel industry. He came to realise, he says, that the situation was/is becoming so dire there’s no time “for slow graceful cultural evolution”. Consequently, the last part of the book deals with the goal of encouraging educational institutions to divest their investment portfolios of fossil fuel industries. They’ve targeted educational institutions because students represent a significant percentage of climate change activists. For these students the question is simple:

are you paying for our education by investments in an industry that guarantees we won’t have a planet to make use of that learning?

I’ve only touched the surface of what this book covers. Like many books of its type, chances are that it will only be read by the converted. That’s a bit of a shame, but it’s not useless says McKibben:

You might think it’s a waste to preach to the choir, but the truth is, you need to get the choir fired up, singing loudly, all out of the same hymnal. The choir is there, but most of the time it’s just humming in the background, or singing so many tunes that no distinct harmony emerges.

So, if you’re part of the choir, this book is still for you. And if you’re not, think about joining. It could be the most important thing you do.

Bill McKibben
Oil and honey: The education of an unlikely activist
Collingwood: Black Inc, 2013
255 pp.
ISBN: 9781863956178

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc)

* Stefanie has since posted a link to a British blog called Climate Change Garden.

Griffyn Ensemble’s 2013 Elements of Canberra season

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The Griffyns ended their 2013 season on a high … literally (in a performance of “Southern Sky”) and figuratively (with beautiful playing under somewhat challenging circumstances … but more on that anon).

Griffyn Ensemble, CSIRO Discovery Centre

Downstairs, CSIRO Discovery Centre (A bit dark for my digital compact!)

You have to be hardy to be a Griffyn Ensemble follower. You never know where you will have to go to hear their next concert. In this Canberra Centenary year for their “Elements of Canberra” season, we went to the Belconnen Arts Centre ( “Water”) where the lovely Lake Gininderra forms a backdrop, the CSIRO Discovery Centre ( “Earth”), the TAMS Depot industrial hangar (“Air”) and the roofless shell of the ruined telescope on Mt Stromlo (“Stars”). These are not your usual concert venues with plush seats. In fact, a couple required some serious rugging up, but if the musicians are prepared to perform in these atmospheric venues, their loyal followers are clearly prepared to join them.

I haven’t written about the Griffyns this year since the first concert, mainly because we headed off overseas the day after the second concert and had only just returned, with all the concomitant catching up to do, before the third. (Indeed we sandwiched our trip to fit between these two concerts). I don’t plan to review them now. As I’ve said before, I’m not a musician. What I know, technically, about music you could fit on a clarinet reed. But, I do like music that moves, entertains, wows and challenges me – and this is what the Griffyns do for me. So, instead of writing a review, I’m just going to do a little recap of the other three concerts of the season.

It is not necessary to understand music; it is only necessary that one enjoy it (Leopold Stokowski)

The second concert was themed Earth, focusing on Trees and celebrating National Science Week. It took place in the CSIRO Discovery Centre’s atrium, where we were surrounded by trees, and displays and models from nature. It was mid-August and therefore winter in Canberra. Just as well we brought our winter woollies as the Griffyns took us on a musical and physical journey, upstairs and downstairs in this atmospheric, open-plan-glass-walled building. The concert was accompanied by a stylish booklet designed by local artist Annika Romeyn (whose illustrations were on display at the concert). That concert was some time ago now – or at least, I have done much since then including a 2-month overseas trip – so the memory has dimmed. It was, however, a typically eclectic Griffyn concert, as Annika Romeyn describes on her blog. It started with Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho‘s lovely, wistful piece “Fall” which, to me, had at times a rather Japanese sound. It featured the harp (Meriel Owen). And it ended with Michael Sollis’ composition, “City of Trees”, which was commissioned by Robyn Archer for our Centenary. In between were pieces like Martin Wesley-Smith‘s now well-known and fun “Caterpillar”; German-American composer Ursula Mamlock’s “Der Andreasgarten” featuring critters like dragonflies and hummingbirds; an arrangement of Cold Chisel’s “Flame Trees”; and, dear to my heart, Michael Sollis’ “Song of Trees”. It was composed for the opening of the National Arboretum and comprises an extensive list of tree names starting, of course, with gums. It was sung with aplomb by the Ensemble. You can read Clinton White’s review of this concert at CityNews.

Griffyn Ensemble, TAMS Depot, Kingston

Griffyns in the Tams Depot, Kingston

The next concert, Air, saw us sitting around cable drums in an old hangar on, fortunately, a very pleasant Spring day. We were neither too cold nor too hot. This concert, which coincided with the SPIN Festival, took us travelling by train, bike, plane and even into space. It started on a light note with Luigi Denza’s “Funiculi Funicula”, led by the always-expressive soprano Susan Ellis, and included another ensemble vocal piece led by Ellis, Freddie Mercury’s “Bicycle Race”. As with all their concerts, this one featured some seriously virtuosic playing, particularly from Kiri Sollis (flute) whose “The Great Train Race” (by Ian Clarke) was breathtaking and Matthew O’Keeffe who pushed his clarinet to surely its highest registers in “Someone is learning how to fly” (by Marie Samuelson). The final piece was Brian Eno’s mesmerising, eerie “Music for Airports” (first movement). It’s some 15 minutes or so long and rather repetitive but I could have listened forever. Dare I say I could imagine doing yoga to this, lifting my spirit while contorting my body!

Mt Stromlo burnt out telescope

In the roofless, burnt out telescope on Mt Stromlo

The year ended on something a little different, because, unusually, the whole concert comprised one multi-movement piece called “Southern Sky” by Estonian Urmas Sisask who was inspired by his visit to Australia in the 1990s. You can read an excellent review of the concert on the Canberra Critics Circle blog. I really can’t add anything to what they’ve said. It was cold but, luckily for us (and the musicians), the rain that fell a few kilometres away on my house missed us. The piece, arranged by Michael Sollis, shows off all members of the Ensemble (as the above-mentioned review describes). It was magical, spoilt only by the fact that the cloudy sky meant that astronomer Fred Watson could not actually point out any of the constellations represented in the pieces. I did love seeing Wyana O’Keeffe back in her percussion spot. We’ve missed her this year while she’s been away on baby duties.

And so 2013 ended, a credit to Michael Sollis and his impressive all-round musicianship. What a team they are.

The Griffyns have announced their 2014 season, which is themed “Fairy Tales” and will see them again collaborating, as they like to do, with other creators around town. I can hardly wait.

If you are interested, you can hear examples of some of the music we’ve heard on the links below – but note that many of the pieces will be somewhat different to the versions we’ve heard, as ours were arranged by Michael Sollis for the Ensemble’s particular mix of instruments:

With apologies for this self-indulgent post but, you know, it’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to!

Lesley Lebkowicz, The Petrov poems (Review)

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Canberra poet Lesley Lebkowicz has made a couple of brief appearances in my blog: first in my post on The invisible thread anthology, and then when she won this year’s ACT Poetry Award. I was consequently more than happy to accept for review her latest book, The Petrov poems.

English: Evdokia Petrova at Mascot Airport, Sy...

Evdokia being escorted by two Russian diplomatic couriers to a plane at Mascot Airport, Sydney (Presumed Public Domain, from NAA, via Wikipedia)

It’s intriguing that nearly 60 years after the events, we are still interested in the Petrovs. In fact, I have written about them before, in my review of Andrew Croome’s historical novel, Document Z. Most Australians will know who they are, but for those global readers here who don’t, the Petrovs were a Russian couple who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra in the early 1950s. Vladimir (Volodya), Third Secretary, and his wife Evdokia (Dusya) were both Soviet intelligence officers (or, to put it baldly, spies). They defected in 1954. The defection was particularly interesting because Vladimir defected first, and Evdokia two weeks later at the airport in Darwin after some dramatic scenes at Sydney’s Mascot airport.

At first glance, The Petrov poems looks like a collection of poems but in fact it is a verse novel, albeit one comprising many short individually-titled poems. These poems are organised into four “chapters”: Part 1, Volodya defects; Part 2, Dusya defects; Part 3, The Petrovs at Palm Beach; and Part 4, The Petrovs in Melbourne.

I must admit that I wondered, initially, why Lebkowicz had decided to write about the Petrovs, given that they have already been picked over in novels, non-fiction, theatre, and television. But, as soon as I started reading it, I could see why. Lebkowicz gets into the heart of these two characters, bringing them back to ordinary human beings who were caught up in something that was both of and not of their own making. It is a rather pathetic story. There are no heroes here – and yet, as happens with these sorts of things, it captured the world’s attention for a short time.

Now, before I comment specifically on this book, I’d like to quote another Canberra poet Paul Hetherington from an interview with Nigel Featherstone in the online literary journal Verity La:

One of the ways I recognise the poetic is when I find works in which language is condensed, ramifying, polysemous and unparaphraseable. Part of what I wish to do when writing poems is to make works that speak in such ways – but to do so without resorting to any kind of trickery or artificial obscurity.

While I wouldn’t use words like “ramifying” and “polysemous”, and while we can paraphrase the ideas to a degree, this is pretty much what Lebkowicz achieves in The Petrov poems. In just 80 pages or so she manages to not only tell the story of their lives but get to the nub of their hearts and psyches – as much, anyhow, as anyone can do for another person. We learn that Volodya is not succeeding at spying:

He wants to succeed but stumbles. Failure
follows him like iron torn from a roof and
rattled along the wind.
(from “Glass I”)

We learn that he loves Dusya (“Dusya is his place in the world”), but that he loves booze, his dog and prostitutes more. He seems weak, but he’s a man struggling. With Stalin’s death and the arrest of his boss, he fears reprisals when he returns to Moscow. Here he is at the moment of defecting (which he does, after disagreements on the subject, without telling Dusya):

Once again he’s going to be wrenched from the soil.
He remembers his father – struck by lightning, buried up to his neck
by foolish men, and dying in the freezing night.
Then chaos and not enough food. Uprooting a full-grown plant
is no easy thing: so many roots
are wound through the earth. He mutters the Russian words
for sadness and home and ruffles his Alsatian’s fur.
(from “Loss”)

Dusya, on the other hand, is a stronger character, but she has suffered severe losses in her life, including her first love and her daughter:

This is something Dusya does not allow herself to think: how her
life might have been if Romàn had not been arrested. […]
If she had gone on taking happiness for granted. Living with
Romàn had been like walking along a winter street and arriving
in a field of warm poppies. If Romàn had not been broken in a
labour camp. If Irina had not died –
(from Romàn I)

While she understands Volodya’s fear, she fears even more what might happen to her family if she defects. At Darwin airport she doesn’t want to make a decision: “If only/this government man would abduct her”. But of course he can’t.

We then watch them as their relationship falters, first during ASIO’s interrogation, and then the years of living together in Melbourne, officially in disguise but known nonetheless. (“The whole street knows they are Petrovs -/too many photos, too much publicity”).

While I’m not a Petrov expert, I’ve read enough to feel that Lebokowicz’s interpretation is authentic. She explores what happens when the political interferes with the personal; she recognises the pull of culture and the despair that losing one’s home can engender; and she sees that corruption is not confined to communism:

so when ASIO falsifies (No! Not falsifies –
amends, adjusts, even corrects) the documents
he brought from the Embassy – of course he assents
(from “Bones”)

Australian Women Writers ChallengeThese are wonderful, readable poems. They are poetic but, to quote Paul Hetherington’s goal, without “trickery” and “artificial obscurity”. The imagery is strong but clear. I particularly liked the way Lebkowicz varies and plays with form. None of it is rhymed, but there are sonnets, couplets, poems with multi-line stanzas but closing on a single dramatic line, and others. There are poems with short lines or terse rhythms, indicating action or stress, and poems with long lines conveying thoughts and reflections. There is also a shape-poem, “Torment”, in which the zigzag shape mirrors Dusya’s distress (“Her life is a staircase that switches directions”).

Like any good historical fiction – if a verse novel can be called that – you don’t need to know the history to understand the story told here. And like any good historical fiction writer, Lebkowicz has produced something that enables us to reconsider an historical event from another perspective and to understand the humanity below the surface of the facts. An excellent and moving read.

Lesley Lebkowicz
The Petrov poems
Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2013
95pp.
ISBN: 9781922080141

(Review copy supplied by Zeitgeist Media Group)