Rebecca Kylie Law: A Contemporary Metaphysical Poet

Rebecca Kylie Laws talks intimately about her new IP book In My Days and In My Sleep from her perspective as a poet and Catholic.

Rebecca's book will be launched at Bookoccino Bookshop on Sunday, 17 May, from 3 p.m. You can RSVP here.

The organ in St Mary’s Cathedral, St. Mary’s Road, Sydney has a beautiful console in the nave, designed I think by Eric Wisden and consisting of brass piping across horizontally slatted wooden backings that form part of a complex wooden sound structure. The piping is remarkable for the precision of its varying heights, remaining consistent in the increments by which they become taller and by which they recede. Indeed, they seem, toward the back, almost fan-like in their arrangement and the stronger, bigger and taller pipes at both sides add to this symphony of the delicate with the robust. 

When I first saw it I thought it was, aesthetically, a little like a book of poems, some short, some medium and others long. My new book essentially began here and became the reason for the religious overtones of the poems within. 

Of course, I was not at St Mary’s by accident but, rather, was attending a weekly service as a Catholic. To the non-religious person it truly is impossible to explain what it means to worship God in this ritualistic fashion other than to profess a faith I have had since a child, a faith that was given to me by my parents, vis-à-vis my education. 

The experience is extremely personal and rewarding in the sense the quietude of prayer, that dark space behind closed eyes in which you are with your soul, your heart, your feeling, directs you toward calmness. It is as though in drawing together your hands and kneeling you are facing yourself at your most composed and most beautiful: your most un-self. This is integrity and through prayer and worship, I follow it as my God and my light, my truth. 

At the same time I am with God, I am recognising a divine presence and sharing my most private life with him. I sometimes laugh at how useful that word, God, is, because it means in the one address, for instance, the beginning of prayer with “dear God”, I am really saying hello to the Trinity, to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Which in this sense means I am also addressing my church. So you see, prayer can be complicated! 

This point brings me to an important question a few people have recently asked: “how can you reconcile what has been happening in the media lately with your own faith?” This, more precisely, refers to the innumerable sex crimes the church tried to hide.

Well, my answer is very simple. Sexual abuse is everywhere. It is happening next door or over the street from where you live. It is happening to your best friend or friend of a friend. It is perpetrated by lovers, by strangers, by new acquaintances or teachers; and, sadly, by priests. In light of this, to my mind, the church has been disproportionately singled out by a media spotlight that, almost through bemusement, won’t beam the light of exposition elsewhere. So I continue in my relationship with God and go to Mass etc. because there are a lot of people in the world and some are bad, some so-so and some good.  

Now to poetry… 

My prayers are not poems. One comes to mind that could be with potential but, no, onthe whole they are quite different. They were written to share with others the experience of prayer, of being quiet with yourself and looking around at the world, of appreciating life and the loves you have in it, the people, animals or favourite moments. 

Some of the poems were inspired by walks in the botanic gardens, others at the beach whilst others were more sudden, for example, a child break-dancing or at my feet, sunlight catching the iridescent colours of a pigeon’s neck. 

One of the greatest tests, I think, for any person, is accommodating tragedy into the pace of everyday life. Halfway through the book, my dad became quite sick with cancer and died after a four-month battle. Spending time with him during his illness and in the last weeks whilst composing my book I remember making a very firm decision that this would not ‘become’ the book. I wanted to be sure the book showed enough resilience and faith to take my life past what I was about to lose. So there are a few dad poems, but not too many! 

To be honest, when I was first bedside with dad (an architect and later, church architect) I didn’t want to write any poems about his illness or last days. I was annoyed at Dylan Thomas for writing his exquisite poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” because to my mind he had cashed in on a personal tragedy. Yet write about it I did. And take the book past the fact, I did too.  

I have always written poetry. In my early twenties I tried out short fiction and was published, even shortlisted for a national prize; but, in all honesty, this is not my genre. Nor would anyone want it to be if they read any of my attempts. 

This book is poetry because it is the closest I get to prayer without telling the world my most private, intimate thoughts or worse, introducing you to the God I talk to before falling asleep.In My Days and In My Sleep is personal but not private, shared publicly because I think what I have witnessed, lived and loved is important.     

     

Hemingway in Spain is featured in a new critical book

The most gratifying outcome for an author is, of course, to have his book bought in huge numbers. But the next best thing is to be the subject of an extended critical study. That's what's happened in the case of my book, Hemingway in Spain: Words and Images (1st edition, 1997; 2nd edition 2007), and the feature film Hemingway in Spain, which was released in 2006.

In his 2015 book Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a Fictional Character, American academic Ron McFarland studies both works at length in his final chapter, "Hem Among the Poets". Dr McFarland has graciously given his permission for us to quote from his analysis of the works.

David P. Reiter’s book, Hemingway in Spain: Words and Images (1997, 2nd edition, 2007) offers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of Ernest Hemingway in that post modern vein touring contemporary Spain accompanied by his girlfriend Maria, presumably borrowed from his 1949 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. As Publisher of Interactive Publications in Brisbane, Australia, Reiter, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, has seen to the publication of several of his own books, and on the IP Web site he describes the “several ‘Hemingways’” that make up the sequence as “voices from the past and present, real and imagined” in a mode he calls “fusion poetry.” In a DVD based on the book and released in late 2006, available through amazon.com, Reiter fuses his reading of most of the poems (only sixteen of the 61 are not included) and an elaborate pastiche of images and videos pertinent to the texts. We can sample the variety of these Hemingway voices by reflecting on a few of the poems, starting with the first one, “At Plaza de España, Madrid,” where we hear a voice sounding very much like Hemingway addressing Cervantes:

You were their best, Miguel,but you only got it right once.Is that why they bronzedthe myths before the man?

The presumably rhetorical question might apply equally to Hemingway. Hemingway––or more accurately David Reiter, speaking through that mask or persona––then rips on Franco, whom he reduces to no more than “wet sand: between toes of the peónes. In the DVD, Reiter provides images ranging from statues of Cervantes and Franco on horseback to a quick clip of a donkey. Throughout he occasionally inserts lines of text from the poems, in this case the description of Franco as “no more than wet sand between their toes.” 

As the poem ends, Reiter looks back to a piece of dialogue near the conclusion of The Sun Also Rises, when Brett says, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God” (249). The neuter pronouns’s antecedent may or may not be regarded as ambiguous. It would seem from the context that she means simply “deciding not to be a bitch” is what we have instead of God. But Jake proposes that they have a martini, so one might surmise that alcohol is “what we have,” and in a broader context, perhaps “it” refers to love, or perhaps to feeling “rather damned good.” In appropriately post modern fashion, Reiter’s Hemingway offers “irony’s what we have instead of God” (4). Addressing Cervantes again, he writes, “You took up a pen to escape a war; / I took up battle to escape an uncertain / pen.” In the closing line, he declares flatly, “Things haven’t changed a hell of a lot.” The opening poem is set opposite a familiar photograph of Hemingway from the early 1930’s. Another twenty or so photos of scenes from Spain are distributed throughout the book, and most of those also appear in the film. 

The second poem in the book, “A Clean Well-lighted Place,” opens with a three-line passage from A Moveable Feast and follows with a quatrain very much in synch with the style and tone:

It’s easier when you come back in winter, in the half-life. The sun’s more sympathetic to grey and you can sip a cheap rosé without regretting those stories you left too quickly [5].

Hemingway then notices a wooden bust of himself, and he comments on how a waiter told tales of how Papa composed A Moveable Feast there in Madrid and he made out so well with the tips that he was able to open his own place, which he called “Not the Hemingway Restaurant / and all the postmodern pretenders go there” (6). Ernest claims not to be able to understand a word the postmodernists say. In the third poem, “At the Hotel Florida,” the first-person speaker signs the register as “E. Hemingway, / Ketchum, Idaho,” and in the lobby he encounters Maria, who will accompany him throughout the rest of his visit to Spain (7). In that poem we watch him struggle with his writing. Maria joins him in the next poem, “No Writers in the Prado.” There and elsewhere in the book the dictator Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, is conjured up and repudiated as a man incapable of appreciating art or literature. 

Some sense of how the poems affect the reader can be gained by citing a few opening stanzas in which the historical past (sometimes the Spanish Civil War, sometimes events from much more distant history––Reiter provides explanatory endnotes) mingles with the present:

It took days for our troops to reach Toledo through all the sniper fire and land mines but just a few hours for Maria’s old Renault 

[“The Walls of Toledo,” 15].

I couldn’t help but think of Robert Cohen
as we walked by that pathetic synagogue
scrunched between souvenir shops

[“In the Barrio de la Juderia,” 25].

Charles was tapping his sceptre in the dustas we passed the ticket counter. “I suppose,”he said, “that Boabdil asked you to intervene with me on his behalf. The man has no shame.He gives the crown––or whatever he wore––a bad name.” [Boabdil, or Muhammad XII, was the lastMuslim ruler of Granada, the last Muslim-ruled city in Spain] 

[“Charles V Sets the Record Straight,” 65].

It would have been pure hell for Scott––a Hollywood without martinis and olives––but old Clint never looked so fit.

“You won’t believe your eyes, Hemingway,”he said, “but they’ve done it up in spades.Look at this––it’s a base away from home!” 

[“Clint Eastwood at Tabernas,” 73].

Some of the poems are more subtle, and in some Hemingway appears nonexistent, or perhaps more completely blended into a first-person speaker who seems more akin to David Reiter lowering the mask. In the credits at the end of the film, Reiter states simply, “David Reiter was Ernest Hemingway.” 

True to the postmodern premise of the poems, anything can happen. For example, in “Bluffing at Gibralfaro” (Lighthouse Hill in Málaga, per Reiter’s endnote––a castle-like fortification on a hill that rises about 427 feet over the Mediterranean) a gypsy attempts to force Hemingway to pay a parking fee, an obvious scam. “Here was another gypsy / who didn’t recognize Hemingway!” he grouses (48). When the gypsy returns with a shillelagh, Hemingway, slipping into the role of his own character, Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls, regards him as “one of the faceless ones I shot down / before I passed out above the bridge.” Then just as a fight seems inevitable, Teddy Roosevelt shows up with “a mean bull-whip” and the gypsy turns tail. “Get tough, / Hemingway,” TR advises, that’s the ticket to ride” (50). In that gesture, Reiter connects what was most likely an unpleasant contretemps he experienced as a tourist in Málaga with Hemingway, with the fictional character of Robert Jordan, with Theodore Roosevelt (as Rough Rider), and with the Beatles via the allusion to their 1965 hit “Ticket to Ride.” Viewing the bullring from the ramparts of the Gibralfaro, TR scoffs at bullfighting, but Hemingway suggests, “Maybe that’s what they have instead of God” (51). 

Near the end of the book Maria parts company with Ernest, ending their relationship “quick / as a bullet” and reminding him, “If you have to turn the page / the ending was wrong!” (105). In the final two poems Hemingway first visits the Escorial, where Philip II (1527-1598) welcomes him and Ernest likens writers to kings: “The veins we mine are the only ore / worth a sentence. Yet who else loses sleep / over the marrow behind the architecture?” (107). He then visits the Valley of the Fallen, a monument to the dead from the Spanish Civil War. Here he feels the presence of Franco, who had the site constructed by prisoners of war, but Franco is not there:

I walked further and further into the mountain but I couldn’t find him among the statues. Maybe he’d decided not to interrogate the myth [110].

Of course, both the film and these poems, most of them driven through with lines and characters drawn from Hemingway’s prose, invite just such an interrogation.

Both titles are available in physical and eBook formats from the IP Store.

Michael Cohen at the Tucson Festival of Books

On a sunny afternoon in Arizona, author Michael Cohen signed copies of his book at the Tucson Festival of Books.

We asked him to blog about the festival, and here are his impressions...

'I signed copies of my essay collection A Place to Read at the Tucson Festival of Books on Sunday, March 15th. This two-day book fair is held on the University of Arizona campus under old palm trees in the warm, dry air of southern Arizona.

Already in just its seventh year, the festival has grown to be the fourth largest in the United States, attracting 130,000 readers, who come to see their favorite authors, 350 of whom give individual talks, workshops, and panel discussions.

Many more authors can be found autographing their books at the authors’ pavilions and the booths of publishers and booksellers. Over three hundred exhibitors show their wares at the festival. Attendance is free for the public, but proceeds from booth rentals and other fees (over a million dollars so far) are donated to local non-profit organizations that promote increased literacy.


           
This year a visitor could have attended talks by Joyce Carol Oates, Noam Chomsky, Iris Johansen, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Jim Harrison, Alice Hoffman and dozens of other best-selling authors. The emphasis was on books, but Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva and columnist Katha Pollitt spoke on a panel celebrating the 150th anniversary of the liberal weekly The Nation.



Promoting her memoir and spy fiction was Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA covert operative who was outed by Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scooter Libby (who went to jail for it) after Plame’s journalist husband had published articles critical of the Bush administration.

Genre writing of all kinds was well represented at the festival, and so were children’s and young adult fiction. There was a little something for every reader’s taste. For most of the two-day festival, a stiff breeze shook the white tents of exhibitors up and down the university mall, but the crowds were undeterred.'

To order, Michael's book in either physical format or as an eBook, please link to our online Store.

Dmity Powell reviews James Munkers: Super Freak

We're pleased to see yet another positive review of James Munkers: Super Freak by talented author Lindsey Little, this time from Dmity Powell of Boomerang Books:

"Author, Lindsey Little likes looking at things from great heights. Me too. It is how I choose my rugs, for one. Allowing yourself a chance to gain a different view of a situation or object can afford you a very different perspective of it. And having a different perspective can be very rewarding indeed. As I discovered when reading Little’s, debut YA novel, James Munkers Super Freak.

The slightly ominous cover, whilst indicative of the story, belies a strong and captivating narrative, which happily, I was reluctant to walk away from.

James Munkers is a weedy, non-descript, slightly whiny teenager tumbling along in a large blended family when suddenly out of the blue, he is forced to adapt to a new town, new school, and disturbingly new powers.

Turns out, James is intrinsically entwined in a plot to destroy the world. Desperate to assimilate as inconspicuously as he can into his new surroundings, he is instead thrust head first into a destiny he’d rather forget.

Disappearing fathers, alarming bright blue, havoc-wreaking critters, and inter-dimensional communication conundrums gives James repeated headaches and plenty of reasons to want to run and hide.

Did I mention the local school thug who won’t let up on him and a headmaster who is keen to suck the life power out of him? Instead of cowering, he throws up a lot whilst slowly coming to turns with saving the world. As improbable as all that may sound and in spite of a few convenient plot quick fixes, Little peppers the narrative with plenty of believable sardonic humour and characters as vibrant and varied as those found in a certain school of witchcraft and wizardry.

James’s inherent nerve lies forever just inches beneath a veneer of teen sass and cynicism. Thankfully, Little’s (aka James’s) solid and convincing voice allows us plenty of glimpses at James’s vulnerability so that you really want to rally beside him along with his mate, Jem and an assortment of other all-for-one, one-for-all Guardians.

Fast-paced and witty, this punchy fantasy winds up well while leaving several big questions unanswered, thus paving the way for further James Munkers adventures.

Young teens (boys in particular) will have little trouble tuning into James Munkers’s ‘human-dimensional power’ trip."

#Dalek & David in the Sydney Morning Herald

IP is very proud of our Poetry Series. Born out of the ashes of the Penguin Poetry Series, IP has published an impressive range of established & emerging Australian and New Zealand poets, and, last year, our first American poet, the excellent Andrew Hubbard, with his delightful Things That Get You.

Recently, we dipped our collective toe into the anthology market with two ground-breaking books that were thematically related: Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand and The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.

In the most recent anthology, which features a Who's Who of Australian poets, as well as some emerging authors, the common denominator was New Zealand based Tim Jones, who edited Voyagers with Mark Pirie. The new anthology was co-edited by Canberra poet PS Cottier. Tim and PS worked over several months with our Senior Poetry Editor, David Reiter.

Poetry publishing is always a risky business, and even more so with such a specialised focus as "speculative" work. But as Mark Pirie said of Voyagers, "prose writers have had their way for too long", and it's time we showcased poets working in that mode.

Voyagers was a Listener Book of the Year in New Zealand, and we hope that The Stars wins the recognition it deserves here in Australia. Already a critical success, The Stars made it into the Big League this weekend, with an extensive review in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times, and other Fairfax newspaper syndication hopefully soon to follow.

Peter Pierce's review is so detailed that we couldn't resist reprinting it in whole here. Thanks to Karen Hardy, Editor at the Canberra Times for making it happen! And to our Business Manager, the #Dalek, for reminding you to buy the book soon and share this posting with your networks so that you are not EXTERMINATED!!

The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.
Edited by Tim Jones and P.S. Cottier. Interactive Press. $26.

One of the most enterprising, unusual and rewarding anthologies of the last year is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, edited by New Zealand writer Tim Jones and Australian poet PS (Penelope) Cottier. The key word in the sub-title is defined with an appropriate generality: "the speculative is the area in which we attempt to write what we can't possibly know". 

The poets included range from the 19th century to the present, a much narrower temporal span than their poems, which travel millennia into the future and across galaxies. Bearing the latter point in mind, the editors note that theirs is a book "with a wide geography and an interesting fauna". They continue: "Here be dragons, true, but also zombies (traditional and vegetarian), werewolves, swagmen, poets small enough to fit into pockets, aliens of various sorts, angels, people made mostly of spare parts, or preserved wholly in DNA, and intergalactic tradies."

The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, 

Edited by Tim Jones and P.S. Cottier. Photo: supplied

Though the book covers so much territory (and given the list above, unsurprisingly has several poems set in museums and zoos), it is tightly and wittily organised into five thematic sections, each taking its name from a notable nineteenth-century poem. The first, dealing with "space travels and related pursuits", is "We don't know where he's at" (from Banjo Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow"); the second, "Howsoe'er anomalous", concerned with "aliens, weird creatures, surrealism and magic realism", comes from a poem as strange as any that is to be found here: Barron Field's "Kangaroo". Next – with its title from Henry Lawson – is "On the Wallaby (temporal)", whose subject is "time travel and visions of the end of the world". It is followed by "The fifth part of the earth" (Field again): "Australia in various lights".  Last is "His ghost may be heard" (Paterson – in a version of Waltzing Matilda – and the ballad is here in its entirety too), whose business is "ghosts, fairies, myths and legends".

The collection opens with the controlled whimsy of "Tea and Stars" by the always engaging John Jenkins: "The mouse travelled to the stars/in a blue teacup". John Dolce's "Job for a Hyperdrive Mechanic" works with a wry matter-of-factness: "As I recall the ambient temperature/of the angular discharge tub/airlocked the anode rod". David Adès' travel to "The Three Moons of Tenoa" ends plangently: "how unimaginable a world/with placid seas, and no capacious moons/to sing serenades by". Travel is also the affair of S.K. Kelen's brilliant parody of a tourist brochure in "Flying Toasters". This of Kursa in Beta Eridani: "booking accommodation well in advance is wise though entirely futile". This first section also contains "The Last Man Out" by David Reiter, who is also the publisher of the admirable risk-taking Interactive Press that we can thank for this book.

As promised, aliens roam in Part Two. Diane Fahey's "Silverfish" imagines the Thysaurans, while Benjamin Dodds' "Others" muses of a possible arrival from so-called outer space and then decides "Perhaps they'll simply pass us by/indifferent in sleek behemoths/on the way to a place less/parochial than here". Emilie Zoey Baker presents "The Vegetarian Zombie – the undead salad beast" – while there is homage to a master of the weird, H.P. Lovecraft, in Jude Aquilina's "Cthulhu Calls". Jan Napier's "Poets in Pockets" shows how "they shrill and argue/like an aggravation of lorikeets", while there are poems by Philip Salom and Lisa Jacobson about Daedalus, the space traveller who flew too close to the sun. A number of the poems in The Stars Like Sand were invited. Much to the editors' pleasure, one of those who accepted was Les Murray, whose superb poem "The Future" begins: "There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there/but it is not about it. Prophecy is not about it … Even the man we nailed to a tree for a lookout/said little about it".

In this splendid anthology, that entertains from start to finish, we find such colonial poets as J. Brunton Stephens in "The Courtship of the Future" (AD 2876) depicts a world where – even though people coupling have been "taught to draw the whole soul though/A foot of gutta-percha tubing"– sexual misconduct has not been eradicated. Tim Sinclair'svision of the future in "Silent City" is quietly mournful: "There is no sunrise or sunset in the city,/just a uniform, sourceless glow". In "The End of the World", Lawson's contemporary Victor Daley reveals a peevish and disappointed God who brushes Man off his knees: "With all its glories ripe/The Earth passed, like a spark/Blown from a sailor's pipe/Into the hollow dark". The Stars Like Sand shows us, in the work of the more than 80 poets included, much of that illimitable dark, as well as the flights of fancy and hope that can give brief and brilliant illumination. Seek out this book – admirable, and one of a kind.

Publisher David P. Reiter. Photo: Karen Hardy

Rod Usher's "Sly humour, understated lament"

Judith Quaempts reviews Rod Usher's Convent Mermaid, in The Internet Review of Books

Rod Usher has authored two previous poetry collections, three novels, and three non-fiction titles. His second novel, Florid States, was short-listed for the MIND Book of the Year Award in the UK, and his work appears regularly in leading literary magazines and anthologies. He has worked as a journalist, is a former literary editor of The Age, former chief-sub-editor of The Sunday Times, London, and a former senior writer for TIME magazine in Europe. 


No surprise then that his third poetry collection, Convent Mermaid (Interactive Press, The Literature Series) is filled with imagery and wit, loss and sadness, themes universal to us all. 

“First Hotel,” opens the collection, taking us on a wild ride from our ‘First Hotel,’ to arrival in the world. “If I Go First,” is the last poem, about dying and what we might hope for those we leave behind.

Many of Usher’s poems begin in a humorous vein and end on a serious note. One example is, “If Not More.” Here, a Cro-Magnon man enjoys the simple comforts of his cave while thinking of retiring from long days of hunting, though his wife is against the idea because she doesn’t want him ‘getting in her way’ all day. His children want to ‘move up a rung,’ and modernize the cave. The reader sympathizes while smiling – his predicament isn’t so different from twenty-first century concerns – until the final lines, when this husband and father ruminates on the meaning of beauty and we realize there are more important things in life than, ‘moving up a rung.’

One of my favorites is the deceptively simple, “Hard Rain,” an understated lament of loneliness and sadness over the loss of a pet:

tongue-lashes the bedroom window
water talking its way in
through the unsnug frame,
pooling on the tile floor.
I ought to get up, I say,
do some caulking with the red towel
that dried the dog before…

As in all good poetry, Usher’s poems contain more than meets the eye. His sly humor shines often, as in the title poem, “Convent Mermaid.” A modest, convent-bred girl sheds her clothes to swim in the nude. She is far enough from shore that a voyeur cannot see anything of note, but then he calls out with a request to take a photograph. At such a distance, she thinks, what could it matter? 

Guesstimating distance to darkness of pine,
She treads the wrapping water, shrugs.
Once more she is supine.
He clicks before shyness can its shell resume,
Before Convent Mermaid has time to remember
Our camera has zoom.

Geoff Page Reviews B N Oakman's Second Thoughts

Geoff Page, Poetry Editor at the Canberra Times, has provided an in-depth review of B N Oakman's latest IP title, Second Thoughts.

B.N. Oakman's Second Thoughts is a very different sort of book – much shorter for a start and a tight collection of free-standing poems. Some are related by subject matter, e.g. the poet's deep appreciation of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado (1875-1939) and Spain more generally. Others have a reasonably savage political edge; still others are love poems to his partner, Barbara, who has been prone to serious illness in recent years.

Nearly all the poems are strongly affecting emotionally, partly as a result of Oakman's unusual skill with last lines. These can turn quite suddenly in a new and disconcerting direction – or brutally sum up what we've just seen. This directness of feeling, along with Oakman's leftish political edge and fluency with different linguistic registers, brings to mind the early poetry of Bruce Dawe when he was making his mark on the somewhat conservative Australian poetry establishment of the mid-1960s.

Two early poems stand out in this regard – Neurosurgery and Watching TV News in Madrid, All Saints Day 2011. The first reminds us how, when visiting a loved one in hospital, we can also be deeply upset by the situation and fate of other patients we don't even know. Neurosurgery is constructed of simple observations, cleverly arranged, e.g. the rapid plot development in: "She'll be dead by now / The woman with bright curly hair / The one I saw in Admissions / She and her man and her boy and her girl." Later, the poet sees the woman's empty room and senses the impact her death has had on all three members of her family. The poem concludes: "And then I returned to another room to sit beside another bed / And I took a woman's hand in mine / And gripped it / Hard / Too hard / Much too hard".

The second poem, Watching TV News in Madrid ... is one of several set in Spain, often dealing with the impact of the Spanish Civil War.  Oakman watches an old man on the television screen whose "words defeat my  feeble Spanish". He is looking through graves recently excavated in "a town overrun by rebels early in the war. / The weeping man is Rafael Martinez. / He is 89 years old. He's searching for his father."

Among the other 47 poems in Second Thoughts, there are many of comparable quality. Don't read them in a coffee bar; you might well embarrass yourself by shedding justified but unseemly tears.