Speed date 1: Australian Love Stories
First crush, slow burn or for better or worse?
First crush? Easy. Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dawn’. It’s a paean to a sleeping woman and the reader shares her lover’s gaze. Sensual. Silver-tongued. Seductive. Here’s an amuse bouche: ‘It is allowed that I may let a finger slide into the cup below the shoulder blade and smooth the skin as it rises to her throat.’ Uh huh.
Slow burn? ‘A Sweetly Alien Creature’ by Susan Midalia. A painfully beautiful story about a couple’s yearning to have a child. The woman says, ‘My life began to feel like an old time movie, in which the leaves of a calendar are ripped off and tossed aside by some cruel, invisible hand.’ Ouch.
For better or worse? The stepfather in ‘Swallow’ by John Bauer is a piece of work. He taught his stepson ‘to bury his skills’ and the boy’s mother ‘to hold her neckline when she bent, and she did it now even when nobody was around’. Yow.
The wife in Alexis Drevikovsky’s ‘Once Around the Block’ develops a new muscularity in love and life through her husband’s battle with cancer. She says, ‘I will fight this with him. This; this is what it means to be a wife. Other wives are living on borrowed time, with their mixed netball teams and mutual friends and dirty weekends away. It’s easy for them. They haven’t been tested yet. I rise up.’ Oh mama.
Cheeky, saucy, serious or sensitive?
With 29 stories chosen by Australian short story superstar Cate Kennedy, featuring much-loved Australian short story writers like Carmel Bird, Lisa Jacobson, Irma Gold, Tony Birch, Kevin Brophy and others, I’m Cupid’s quiver groaning with arrows (each unique). To explore love’s complexity and desperate riffs, start with ‘A Greek Tragedy’ by Claire Varley. ‘She peeped through the crack in the door as he opened his bedside drawer and pulled out the photograph. An old woman, smiling, surrounded by her family. Who lived and loved then left this world, leaving behind her secrets and her sorrows.’ The title of the section in which Varley’s fine story is ensconced borrows her dazzling line, ‘There are tears, there is hubris, there is a damnation and a regret.’ Greek? Yes! But universal, too, when it comes to love. Je t’aime.
Most seductive or romantic lines?
This sexy little number from ‘Hooked’ by Toby Sime? — ‘The crucifying nail of her tongue in my ear, skewering me, telling me, in a language older than words, exactly who I was, who I am, so deeply I couldn’t deny any of it.’ Or this smouldering soupcon from ‘Meltemi’ by Susan Pyke? — ‘Everything is still. ‘Maybe only five seconds. It is my whole life … I melted outside of myself, into him. He melted into my skin, into me.’ Or the steamy section in ‘Hammer Orchid’ by Sally-Ann Jones? It involves a hand and a belt buckle — but you’ll have to take me to dinner to get me to reveal any more. Here’s a teaser: ‘The orchid makes itself look like a female wasp and the male wasp flies down, thinking he’s about to get lucky, and gets a face full of pollen instead.’ Date me.
Speed date 2: Australian Love Poems
First crush, slow burn or for better or worse?
First crush? ‘She’s an Argonaut’ by Chloe Wilson has a beautiful symmetry like Man Ray’s photo of the woman with the cello f-holes painted on her back. Easy to admire … Play me.
Slow burn? ‘The Art of Longing’ by Steve Armstrong charts the sometimes-apart/sometimes-together relationship. ‘Fear rarely has its way. We have an agreement — if the words are/stale then we wait. I welcome the silence; it’s without emptiness.’ Pins drop.
For better or worse? ‘the stroking’ by Kevin Gillam is a heartrending description of losing a person you love: ‘drip feeding you the sea in these last hours, quilt of you/barely rippling music on the edge of silence’. Agony.
Cheeky, saucy, serious or sensitive?
Editor Mark Tredinnick has chosen to include 200 poems from 173 poets including Les Murray, Judith Beveridge, Fiona Wright, Cate Kennedy, Robert Gray, Luke Davies, Sarah Holland-Batt and more. In his introduction, he says, ‘There is, I think, about as much trouble in this collection as there is tenderness; as much unmaking as there is making of love. There is lust and sex and fury and grieving and gratitude.’ Dishevelled.
I think … ‘Woo’ by Monica Markinova is saucy, ‘As playful pets, we bounce the Masai tribal/ Terpsichorean and bump every hanging/Picture frame askew; metronomically we swing’. ‘Leaving’ by J V Birch is serious, ‘I place my goodbye on the table/seven years of tears/line dried, folded in pairs’. ‘Post-coital Music’ by Julie Watts is sensitive, ‘In the blue-black bruise of night/the bones of his back vibrate.’ Reverberations.
Most seductive or romantic lines?
Here are my top four …
1. ‘So you crack me softly, like eggs against/a glass lip. Leave me to grow/a wind-dried skin.’— from Chloe Callistemon’s ‘A Familiar Decalogue — My Half (Thou Shalt Not)’. Tactile.
2. ‘Glitter of morning./I will bury you with champagne/and two glasses.’— from Susan Fealy’s ‘We Outgrow Love like Other Things’. Repose.
3. ‘i’ll watch you swim/lick the echo from your ear’ — from Van Roberts’ ‘Surfer Girl’. Dreams come true.
4. ‘Stranger, I have cried in my sleep for you — /my pupils, smooth as nails, hammered down’ — from Michelle Cahill’s ‘Recruit’. Sigh.
So, scatter rose petals on the bed and choose your partner …
Tell me, which of these two books did you choose to date? Or did you opt to have two lovers and choose both?
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