People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Police HQ. Corner of Liverpool and Argyle Streets, Hobart. April 2011.

Three books this week, and all rather good.

Reading in the Dark is Irish poet Seamus Deane’s first. The novel is set in Derry, ~~Norn Iron~~ Northern Ireland and explores the fractured nature of identity, religion, memory and family. Indeed, a working title could well have been Secrets and Lies…

Narrated from the point of view of a young Catholic boy, the novel is constructed from a series of vignettes that are dated and run in chronological order. However, the heart of the plot includes a number of unspoken family secret events dating back to the Irish Civil War and the bloody partition of 1923. Of course, such a setting presents some decent grist for the mill of a novelist.

Thankfully Deane makes the most of it. This is a heartbreaking novel, all the more so when you realise that it could just as well be called a ‘memoir’, as events mirror Deane's upbringing. It can get a bit confusing at times, but that happens in life; especially when you begin to explore the impact of our choices and secrets on our children, and our children’s children.

Highly recommended.

Number 2 concerns Randall Jarrell, one of my favourite poets. I’m amazed that I’ve waited this long to pick up one of his longer works. I figured I’d take the easy way in and start with The Animal Family, and odd little number that may well be written for children, but has a significant following among adults. In this way, it reminds me a bit of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.

It’ll be hard to talk about this without the dreaded SPOILER, so if you’re that way inclined, look away now.

[Ahem.]

So there is a man, all alone, living in a windswept deserted bay.

The he meets a mermaid, bored with her life, who decides to leave the water and stay on land with the man.

The man then comes home with a bear cub. The bear moves in as one of the family.

Then in moves a lynx. The lynx moves in.

Then the lynx and the bear find a baby. And we have our family.

This is a very ‘quiet’ book. It has a gentle rhythm that dreamily explores the nature of shared experience and they way in which we might self-create myths around our own origins and identities, difference, tolerance, and the power of emotional connections.

I’m going to get Henry and Ezra hooked onto it ASAP. Get onto it yourself!

Number three is an equally odd little book, this time by British playwright Alan Bennett. The Uncommon Reader posits the idea of Queen Elizabeth II becoming obsessed with books – the titular "uncommon reader" – after a chance encounter with a mobile library. We then follow the consequences of this obsession for the Queen herself, her household, advisers, and her formal role as head of state.

A very awkward conceit, you may well think (I thought so too), but Bennett pulls it off very effectively. Exploring the process and nature of reading through the vehicle of HRM QEII, the author has fun with it and the reader benefits.

This one won’t take you long to get through, and pays dividends far beyond the effort required. If you’re a reader (and even better if you’re not), give it a run!

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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