From hushed puppies to envelope poems … there’s plenty here to keep you fireside and philosophising during the last few weeks of winter.

Apparently …

There’s always so much to love in joanne burns’ poetry collections and apparently (Giramondo Publishing) is no exception. From her poem tipsy: ‘the pink chemist so / pink nausea pills / overdose on themselves’ and ‘hundreds of French fries scatter / across the road like abandoned / romance / ‘shutters’ / and douse your mouth with mangoes’. And this from lip: ‘teapots leak like hushed puppies    who / believes in loud prophecies these days / mountain tops prefer to sleep like blank / cassettes.’ Genius.

On artists

In On Artists (Melbourne University Publishing) Ashleigh Wilson says #MeToo means artists are no longer excused from general standards of conduct. But if we denounce the artist, what becomes of the work that remains? The list of badly-behaved artists is gobsmacking – and I’m pondering will give up listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue because of what Davis did personally? Wilson quotes curators who’ve decided against showing an artist’s work when their victims are likely to be hurt further by the gallery’s endorsement. Thought provoking.

Digital life and loss

In ABR Online, Alex Tighe said of Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age (Quarterly Essay 72) by Sebastian Smee (Black Inc): ‘It’s short enough to read in one burst. Try and do so without mindlessly picking up your smartphone halfway, and maybe, by the end, you’ll think twice before you pick it up again.’ Plenty to chew on here including why we let companies monetise parcels of our time online, when it seems to be at odds with our inner life.

Crushing bones

‘Whodunnit?’ is not the only question you’ll confront as you read Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Text Publishing) – translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. In the bleak Polish midwinter, Janina Duszejko is troubled by the disappearance of her dogs, murders in an isolated village, why human life is valued more than animal life, and her own painful illness (‘I am a phantom built out of pain’). Duszejko is reclusive, unconventional, and fond of angsty philosophising. A strange and unique book.

Envelope Poems

One note from one bird is written in the shape of a wing and The way hope builds a house is on an opened-out envelope, house-shaped. Both are penned in Emily Dickinson’s handwriting. Although Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was a prolific poet she published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime. Editors then and since often removed her variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes – but in these pocket-size pages in Envelope Poems (New Directions), they’re left intact. A literary delight.

This article first appeared in the August 2019 issue of the South Sydney Herald.