Andrew Kelly writes about the use of the first-person narrator, as opposed to the third. He notes that "as a child (not a teenager) I preferred the adult warmth of the 3rd person, the sense of sitting on the narrator's knee...The first person seems peculiarly suited to the the intense egotism of the teen years." He needs to expand on this. There's some interesting connotations springing out of this.
The Blogging Parson, from Oxford in the UK, has a deep look at the poetry of Les Murray, and is very impressed: "I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent - which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way - and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively
Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety."
Phryne lists "The Doll Trilogy" by Ray Lawler as one of the five books that changed her life. "These three plays Kid Stakes, Other Times, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll tell the story of six Australians over a 17-year period. The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was required reading at school, but I went onto read the other two and they gave me a greater appreciation for Australian literature and the Australian struggle for identity. The plays lead me to re-read several Australian classics that I had read because of school and had quickly dismissed as relics of a culture long dead."
After an absence from the scene Peter Nicholson is back on the "3 Quarks Daily" weblog with a piece about criticism, which outlines a new approach to critics: "Marbeck Valerian is my imaginary name for all the critics one is going to come across who will misunderstand work, misrepresent it, or land on it like an Exocet missile and proclaim it the best thing since sliced bread, probably the worst fate of all...Marbeck Valerian may be your long-term friend. His/her musunderstandings are the seeds from which art begins its proper journey through time's unpredictable mangle." I wonder if naming them makes it easier or harder to dismiss critics of a certain type?
