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Showing posts from October, 2016

Faith and George Herbert

The George Herbert window in All Saints’, Bishop Burton, near Beverley in Yorkshire:  ‘L ord I have loved the habitation of thine house .’  An address given at Evensong on Sunday the 23 rd of October at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of a series on ‘Heroes of the Faith’. [Poem: Superliminare] Thou, whom the former precepts have Sprinkled and taught, how to behave Thyself in church; approach, and taste The church’s mystical repast. Avoid, profaneness; come not here: Nothing but holy, pure, and clear, Or that which groaneth to be so, May at his peril further go. The people who work on the other side of the hedge of the car park of this church come to learn there is life after politics. Or we hope they do. The poet George Herbert lived a life that could be described as before and after politics. “Power seldom grows old at court,” he says in one of his Outlandish Proverbs, and he experienced the truth of that saying in his

Crossing sixty: Louise Nicholas, Andrew Sant, Susan Varga

Review first published in the Australian Book Review October 2016 Louise Nicholas THE LIST OF LAST REMAINING Five Islands Press, rrp $25.95, 85 pp. 9780734051998 Andrew Sant HOW TO PROCEED : ESSAYS Puncher & Wattmann, price, 132 pp. 9781922186805 Susan Varga RUPTURE : POEMS 2012-2015 UWA Publishing, rrp $22,99, 95 pp. 9781742589091   Poetry as the solidifying of memory, poetry as a survivor’s sanguine amusement, takes a lifetime. Louise Nicholas relates autobiography through strongly considered moments in time. Her childhood is tracked by the small fears, confusions and elations that only later feel like turning points. Aged thirteen,           in the same year but not the day that President Kennedy was shot in Texas, I sit on the sidelines at my first high school social wondering what to make of a new betrayal: the flowered bodice of my favourite party frock straining to contain an embarrassment of breasts where once there wa

Max Richards shares: 8, Harold Bloom

From a cache of cuttings about Harold Bloom, mainly on his book ‘The Western Canon’ (1994) fell a handwritten letter, unsigned and unsent. For some reason Max Richards (1937-2016) starts the letter, then leaves it alone. Maybe it’s a draft for something else. The letter eloquently reveals the sorts of shifts happening in Melbourne literary studies, Melbourne by then just typical of more widespread changes in attitude and practice.                                                                      1/7/95                                                                    Saturday Dear Brian, I was at a loss for words on Bloom, wasn’t I?   What I might finally have got around to saying is that I doubt Bloom missed much in the ‘theory boom’. His earlier criticism tended to be thesis-ridden – I remember John Butt saying as much to me in Edinburgh in 1964, and Norman Holmes Pearson when he visited La Trobe in 1968 or so. But they were old literary historians

Max Richards shares: 7, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Isaac Babel

Max Richards at the window overlooking Lake Union in Seattle A sequence of four dream poems arrived from Seattle by email on the 20 th of May 2016. As with ‘share 6’, Max Richards (1937-2016) reveals how an intense reader of literature will meet authors in their dreams, whether local or exotic. He liked to present some of his rambling verse of this kind in different fonts and point-sizes. Dear Readers, I Dreamed 1. In a Manner of Speaking Dear readers, how are you all enjoying my new poem - OK so far? - opens well? I say all - as if you’re plural, if not multiple, however alone you are as you read. Alone - but not lonely? We keep each other  kindly company. Truly, I have trust in what we can achieve together, a sort of double-jointed, double- handed enterprise: like a sparrow tangled in a spring-green hedge a phrase tries to emerge. What arrives is like a simile, trailing twigs and green debris. The hedg