While visiting Byron recently, I strolled towards the ocean. Although winter, it was warm and cloudless, the sea a glossy brochure-blue. I sat on the grassy verge above the beach, among lolling couples, families and hung-over backpackers. Below me children paddled, several youths swam recklessly through the still-cold water, and wet-suited surfers bobbed up and down, barnacle-like on their boards. I noticed a commotion in the water some way out to sea. Terns and gulls were dive-bombing a patch of water, encircled by frenetic dolphins. One dolphin leapt, Flipper-like, completely out of the water! A large school of fish out there, I thought – then looked harder. Slightly away from the commotion, a differently-shaped fin was coasting just above the water.  I looked around in alarm, but no-one else seemed to have noticed, perhaps lulled by the scene’s postcard beauty.

Here is one metaphor of the poet’s role – that lone voice in the wilderness – even if only a psychological wilderness. After Tennyson, poetry – and poets – lost favour with the popular reader; but contemporary practitioners have used this marginalisation to their advantage. It’s given them an unparalleled freedom to speak the truth, or to investigate what the truth is.

I really like the name of this group: Dangerously Poetic – no accident, I think. In All The Way Home, easy sentiment is eschewed; in poem after poem, uneasy truths raise their fins above our placid suburban seas. There are aesthetically pleasing poems here, yes, but then you come to Kathryn Boorman’s Chuc Mung Nam Moi, describing a meal in Vietnam where ‘the main course is grilled chicken/ squashed flat on the plate, wings in full flap/ head back, beak open in a silent scream.’ This impressive poem allows no escape from the legacy and folly of war.

In Radika Mecredy’s 7-day silence retreat, a quiet, meditative beginning leads to a defiant internal revolution. ‘This moment is huge/ I’ve climbed onto the roof/ I want to yell to the world/ There’s nothing of you … left inside me.’ But rather than devastating, it is a triumphant, energizing hymn to renewal, ending, ‘All my lovers are waiting …’ The often brilliant poems are tellingly arranged by the editors. Boorman’s poem is preceded by John Bird’s tanka sequence on war, which ends: a bronze statue/ of the unknown soldier/ dawn service/ my son points saying/ he can’t close his eyes.’ It was also an inspired choice to include paintings by well-known Mullumbimby artist, Robyn Sweaney; superficially comforting images of traditional suburbia, but laced with irony.I’d come to Byron to announce the winners of the Writers Festival poetry competition, and I’m delighted that the anthology opens with DP member Max Ryan’s winning entry, Jim; its closing lines still prickle the hairs on the back of my neck. In addition to the work from sixteen local poets, the anthology contains the three winners of the national Jean Ringland Memorial Poetry Prize. Dr. Shirley Walker’s comment on the winning entries can also apply to this impressive anthology as a whole: ‘In a mechanical age of instant and meaningless twitter, the ancient craft lives on and is strong.’ “All the Way Home” is $24.95 plus $3 for p&h, from Dangerously Poetic, PO Box 524, Byron Bay N.S.W 2481 Australia

             When recently invited to co-judge the Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize, I felt simultaneously honoured and daunted. Would I be able to sufficiently grade more than two hundred and fifty entries in the allotted time – mightn’t my eyes start to glaze over, my judgment falter? And in the end, might my choices be steamrolled by a far more eminent and experienced co-judge? Actually, if I’d been asked to do this a year ago, I would probably have turned it down. After writing and publishing dozens of poems in the eighties and nineties, about ten years ago I turned away from poetry. I had a young family, more than a full-time job, university…it was just too much; and I had too much appreciation of poetry as an art form to only devote scraps of time to it. Then, a year and a half ago I escaped Sydney’s satanic mills and moved to the mid-north coast, regaining time, reading and thinking space. Poetry began to live and matter again.

I began to read the entries, placing work into tentative piles. Such a community of literate voices, featuring many poems of a high standard. What was I looking for in the winners? In some ways it’s easier to say what I wasn’t looking for: poetry that bowed down before tradition, or tried to be poetic (butterflies flitting towards golden sunsets); poems that adopt a comfortable ‘stance,’ that parrot homilies or assert clichés; that mistake strong emotion for poetry.

I thought back on people and ideas that inspired me and came…to Ezra Pound. Whatever you might think of his later, obscure cantos and questionable politics, in the earlier part of the twentieth century he single-handedly dragged a generation of ultra-refined decadent Victorian versifiers screaming into the modern age. He condensed his approach into three words: make it new. “The artist is always beginning,” he once wrote. “Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. The very name Troubadour means a ‘finder,’ one who discovers.”

For me, this is one of the essences of great poetry: I don’t mean innovation for its own sake – but a feeling for discovery and the new in everyday individual experience; poems in which language, image and rhythm combine to capture the sometimes astonishing experience of being alive. All of the commended and winning entries do this.

I needed to have no concern about my fellow-judge, Peter Bishop. He is almost an ideal judge, with a discerning eye, a profound love of poetry, and an ego-less ability to immerse himself into a work’s qualities. There were no real quarrels between us – many of our shortlisted poems were the same – the real problem we faced was to discern winners from many poems of near equal rank.

All three winners could have been first, but ‘Black Bat Burn’ was both technically accomplished and emotionally resonant, with wonderful images evocative of the Australian landscape under stress. ‘Jim’ is very moving, its imagery staying with you for a long time, and it traverses time and space effortlessly. ‘junction’ has a marvellous American energy and imagistic conciseness – and great humour! Strangely enough, ‘death’ is a central theme of three of the five winning and commended entries; but it’s never treated in a maudlin way, but with courage and a clear-eye. This is especially true of ‘Going to Ground’ – heartbreaking and courageous, and deserving its commendation.

The primary motivation of this website is to advertise my manuscript service, but as I can post literary musings here too…well, why not? And this is a subject and an author of particular interest to me.

          I’ve been waiting some time for Julia Leigh’s second novel – as has a big slice of the literary world – since her debut novel, ‘The Hunter’ (1999), became a major success. Back in 2000, it inspired the Observer to name her as one of the twenty authors to watch in ‘the new millennium,’ and gained her the first Rolex mentorship in New York with Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Perhaps this success, and the natural weight of expectations that followed, created difficulties for Julia – she apparently abandoned a second novel following ‘The Hunter’ – although it’s worth noting she had earlier chosen to not seek publication for her very first novel. Like many successful artists, she places exacting standards on her own work
          However, she may also have been daunted in publishing by the unfortunate tendency of many of our own critics to be still in thrall to the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome. Having read Disquiet I googled some reviews and found that those in the English papers were more generous than in our Australian ones. Now why doesn’t this surprise me? In particular, one in the Sydney Morning Herald by a certain reviewer was particularly harsh – and, I believe, misguided. She talked about ‘nameless horrors’ and towards the end of the review states, ‘it remains until the end so seemingly misguided it’s hard to know what to make of it’. It begs the question that if she didn’t know what to make of it, maybe she shouldn’t have written the review? And I seriously wonder if we were reading the same book.
          I should say here that I knew Julia quite well in the late 90’s; we both worked at the office of the Australian Society of Authors in Redfern, and when the phone wasn’t ringing we would often talk about literature. I was doing the MA in Writing course at Sydney’s UTS at night, and would discuss what we were learning; and she would tell me about the progress of her own novel, which was to become ‘The Hunter’. I remember her telling me of undergoing a trek in the wilderness of Tasmania for background research (the novel follows a ruthless hunter trying to locate the last Tasmanian tiger for a multinational company); at one stage her blisters were so bad she had to take off her shoes and walk barefoot – but this only made things worse! Anyway, after I had left the ASA in mid ‘98, I was surprised that she contacted me and asked if I could do a report on her novel. This was my first paid manuscript assessment, which I did for a nominal fee. I told her I would be supercritical in the assessment, because that was what I knew she wanted, due to her previously mentioned high standards. Even at this draft stage, the writing was very accomplished, and the descriptions of the hunter in the wilderness were particularly compelling – but (of course!) I mentioned aspects of her work that I thought could be improved. Looking back now, it’s a little weird that the first manuscript I assessed may well be the most successful literary project I’m ever involved with. Hopefully not – though I treasure my copy of ‘The Hunter’ in which Julia wrote ‘Thank you for your help with this manuscript’. [Pardon the trumpet blowing, it’s just a way to attract work].
          And so to ‘Disquiet’. I have to admit I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to read this. Having read a couple of Australian reviews – the dire SMH one mentioned above, and another which focused on her writerly brilliance, but gave only a lukewarm endorsement of the new novel, I was bracing myself to be disappointed. And that was wrong of me: reading, whether it’s as an assessor, or critic, or for pure enjoyment – should concentrate on the words on the page, not what someone has said about them. Another factor was that at the time I was in the middle of Tim Winton’s marvelous and jarring collection of stories, ‘The Turning’, and appreciating the unaffected directness of his writing. Leigh’s work is in an utterly different style. ‘Disquiet’ is set in a rambling French chateau, focusing on a woman who has apparently escaped an unhappy marriage in Australia and returned to her family’s estate, with two children in tow. Initially I had sympathy with those who found the writing a little mannered, the atmosphere slightly airless. In the early stages of the book I was reminded of that strange French film ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, whose screenplay was by the French ‘new novelist’ Alain Robbe-Grillet. For those who haven’t seen this film, it is beautifully realised, but highly stylised and surreal. Although Julia’s novel isn’t surreal, it shares the film’s brooding and stylised nature. At the recent Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, Leigh herself introduced a reading from the book with almost an apology to the audience, as the style was not strictly naturalistic, but written in what she called a ‘heightened’ manner.
          One of the great things about worthwhile literature is that it continually upsets your expectations. This occurred in the last third of ‘Disquiet’; page by page the novel and story grew in power and beauty – it was utterly compelling, and unexpected. How was such magic achieved? As Julia mentioned herself, she omitted a great deal of the naturalistic detail you normally expect in a novel, along with descriptions of each character’s thoughts and state of mind. By ‘staying on the surface’ as it were, and only including dialogue and action, a wonderful compression is achieved. This is of course, a great way to involve the reader, as one has to use their own imagination to perceive the inner life and motivations of the characters. When thinking of the book, two metaphors come to mind. Structurally it is like a gothic cathedral – the stone foundations are built up carefully and cautiously, but it ends with soaring grace and colour and light. And emotionally the book is like a python – as you read you don’t notice the coils of the story gradually surrounding you – then it has you, and leaves you breathless.
          Another term to describe ‘heightened’ writing is ‘poetic’ – and especially at the end, this is poetic prose. Julia has a poet’s attention to each word, each paragraph builds on the previous one, like stanzas in an epic poem. And without the ‘clutter’ of normal prose, by the end of the book the characters operate both as themselves and as archetypes, symbols of loss and redemption. Sophie, who has brought home a still-born baby, which she refuses to allow to be buried, is inconsolable loss. She waves at the two children in a canoe as they try to run away, because ‘all children go’; and when the canoe tips over and the children are in danger of drowning, she is motionless. You realise that her grief is so profound and demented that children as a whole have ceased to exist – ‘all children go’. It’s chilling and powerful. As David Lodge has mentioned, the effective use of symbols in novels is very difficult, but Leigh has carried this off.
          Before leaving the subject of children, critics have already noted that there is an almost identical set of children in ‘The Hunter’. Apart from being wonderfully rendered characters, the children are useful in Leigh’s fiction as an ironic counterpoint to the sometimes crazy behaviour of the adults – they’re kin to the fool, and the play-actors in Hamlet. They illuminate the action from an entirely different angle, and are very effective at puncturing a too-rarified atmosphere.
          I can only speak for myself, but I think ‘Disquiet’ is in many ways an advance on ‘The Hunter’. So why the sometimes poor Australian reviews? The tall poppy syndrome’s been mentioned, but the simple answer is that it’s easier to run in a groove that someone else has created; also, if you’re not able to appreciate it, a basely self-protective reaction is to trash it. Some people can’t appreciate a fine use of black humour or understand that, for all it’s ‘nameless horrors’ ‘Disquiet’ has a positive, almost optimistic conclusion. But forget what I’ve said and read it yourself – and then re-read it, as you would worthwhile poetry. The challenge for the writer and the intelligent reader is to overcome received wisdom and make your own mind up – otherwise, what’s the point of anything?

THIS MAN OF WORDS TELLS WENDY ANDREWS ABOUT HIS
LIFE FILLED WITH POETRY, MUSIC AND MANUSCRIPTS.

ALTHOUGH POETRY has always been my main passion, my first creative success was as the singer/lyricist with electronic rock band Distant Locust.
The music was strange. When we played live, audiences were quite surprised with the instruments we played – an antiquated drum machine, all sorts of electronic gadgets to manipulate sound, even children’s toys – and didn’t know what to expect next.
Eventually we became a bit more rock, but maintained a reputation as a cult band.
I remember being told we were “too weird for Sydney”, so after we received a fan letter from Italy, we took a leap of faith, sold all our possessions and travelled to Amsterdam. We chose Amsterdam for the simple reason they speak English there.

“We played … in a converted nuclear
bomb shelter in Berlin.”

We entered an MTV Europe competition for unsigned bands with a video clip we’d made in Sydney. Although our clip was shown on MTV Europe and ABC’s Rage, things moved slowly and we were going through money pretty quickly, so our bass player decided to travel to Florence to find our Italian fan.
By chance, the fan introduced our bass player to some people at a huge record store specialising in independent recordings, which led to us signing with Contempo Records in Florence and releasing a CD. We played in Italy and Holland and also in a converted nuclear bomb shelter in Berlin a year after the wall came down, which was completely surreal.
Going to Europe did pay off for us, but ended up being a rags-to-riches-backto-rags story.
In 1992 we returned to Australia and I returned to my first passion: poetry and writing. I became president of the Poets Union, membership secretary of the Australian Society of Authors and wrote articles for Australian Authors magazine. It was a busy time as I did a lot of odd jobs, a lot of writing, continued to play with the band and got married.

In 1995 my first child was born, the bass player left the band and that was the end of Distant Locust.
I began a Master of Writing, concentrating on novel writing, at Sydney’s UTS under novelist Glenda Adams. My classmates and friends included future novelists Nicki Gemmell (The Bride Stripped Bare), Arabella Edge and Belinda Alexandra. I really enjoyed the classes where we had to read our work to each other and I discovered I have the ability to react honestly and critique the work of others.

Later I started one of the best jobs I’ve ever had with the Royal Society for the Blind as a “talking book” producer. It was a fantastic, very intense process, sitting one-on-one with an actor and guiding the production. The best ‘talking books’ make the text disappear.
I remember being the senior producer for Jeff McMullen (former on-air 60 Minutes reporter). His book told the story of his incredible life, from witnessing events such as the aftermath of Chernobyl to his passion for charity work. He was a great narrator, but would occasionally slip back into his 60 Minutes voice during the read.

After producing talking books, I moved on to freelance audio work for the ABC, working for the Australia Council for the Arts and spending some time with a top Australian manuscript agency.
Sydney is for the young and aggressive, and I’m 50 now, so when I decided to set up my own manuscript service business I made a treechange to Bellingen. I love being here, I feel safe and my eight-year-old son can ride his bike to the shop.
I have the best of both worlds now, living in a great area and doing something I love.
With my business, Renaissance Manuscript Service, I help people who have written manuscripts by providing them with feedback.

I consider all sorts of things when reading a
manuscript: sentence structure, character development, a hook and a reason for the reader and the publisher to read to the end.
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