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If memoir is your ticket. If you’re a sucker for a life story that only uses the crayon colours it loves best. If you wonder what kind of woman reared the author of The God of Small Things (1997 Booker winner) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017 longlist), there’s an autobiography on the shelves, calling your name. It’s time to run, not walk, to the library or bookstore and snag your copy. Tell your partner and kids you’re going offline for the next three hundred pages.
One can immediately tell through the vulnerabilities captured in the collection that McNally is a heart-on-the-sleeve type poet. With this second volume, he chronicles the life of the worker across a landscape of American politics that lays bare personal grief alongside a public manifesto. He laments the fractured reality of the present day with deep moral seriousness. While the politics are pointed, they never come across as partisan screed.
Sacred Remnants explores aspects of Freyberg’s past and the links between colonisation and gentrification and the ways in which history and culture can be fractured by the impulse to sanitise, exploit and commercialise. The book is divided into three parts. The first, Mavericks and Divas, focuses heavily on the colourful characters of Kings Cross who impacted directly on Freyberg, like burlesque and strip tease performer and painter Elizabeth Burton, a frequent subject of Freyberg’s work.
Mayer, an occupational therapist, healer, and writer based in Arizona, New York and Florence, Italy, practices healing based on personal experience. In her book she lauds the relevance of epigenetics, a relatively new approach to gene expression emphasizing the hitherto under-appreciated role of historical and behavioral components of pain, illness and suffering. Components which she and other authors increasingly demonstrate as vitally relevant to the diagnosis and management of disease.
Skylighting is written in close first person with a deeply speculative, experiential tone. Impulsively I ask, why do we write, and read, novels like this? Maybe we are trying to get at something fundamental, visceral. Something communal yet impossible to share. The universal experience of loss accompanied by a grasping, an inability to psychologically adjust to an overwhelming absence
The title, Gardening on Mars, intrigues. Will it involve intergalactic insights? A theme of cultivating plants in our challenging soils? Motifs of extraterrestrial landscapes? Not quite, as Jane Frank’s third poetry collection does take us travelling but with a substantial focus on the interconnected environments of our inner and outer worlds. It is Earth that is walked and returned to us via Frank’s rare choice of images sequenced with unexpected details.
The alternating chapters of the first part that focus on Ntashé as she attends her mother’s trial highlight the tensions between mother and daughter, as she witnesses the way her mother is changed “from the person she knew to the monster gaining color as the trial proceeds.” Though well aware of her father’s violence and drunkenness, Ntashé seems more inclined to sympathize with him than with her mother, whom she sees as a sort of bully.
Ann E. Wallace’s third book of poetry, Keeping Room, examines what it means to live with illness and beauty. And neither has strict borders in Wallace’s beautiful and haunting poems. The illnesses she addresses are not only her own, or her loved ones, but the sickness and depravity of the world we find ourselves in now.
Now-Then shows just how much Ladd has done and the ways in which the work has transformed and progressed over the years. His older work still feels fresh and it’s a pleasure to be able to read generous selections of multiple books in one place. His newer work is rich with a maturity that allows for the lightest touch and the deepest thought. Whether in the Bolivian Mountains, Java, driving along the Huon Highway or in an Adelaide suburb, Now-Then is full of consistently transcendent and powerful work.
Charlotte LeBon was brilliant casting: she looks a lot like the real Niki. (Except she is too expensively coiffed in almost every shot, even in the throes of agony.) Another problem is the camera’s almost deliberate avoidance of Niki’s actual sculptures and paintings: what was all the fuss about, anyway?