Islet and Island would like to announce a change to their publication schedule. Islet will now be publishing its islands-themed issues in autumn (late March/early April) and will be launching these themed issues through the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, during the 2011 Ten Days on the Island festival.
Islet is still calling for submissions. The new closing date is TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30 — check the Islet for more details.
[Stephen Romei, Editorial, Australian Literary Review, September 1st 2010]:
I recently welcomed two hens into my household. Their official (that is, children-chosen) names are Nugget and Worm, but I call them Dame Judi and Mrs Smith. I get a lot of pleasure from looking after them: topping up their feed container, making sure they have fresh water, keeping their coop clean, tucking them in at night and so on. They rise with the sun — and if someone doesn’t rise with them to open their coop we soon hear about it — and put themselves to bed at nightfall. They spend the daylight hours roaming the yard, eating weeds, digging for worms and transacting other chook business.
[Judith Kerr, The Redland Times, August 30th 2010]:
Cleveland resident Stanton Mellick didn’t believe the 1980s critics who claimed Queensland was a cultural backwater, lacking a literary tradition, with no writers to call its own.
So the former University of Queensland lecturer in English went on a 30-year mission to trace the steps of those who have written about locations in the Sunshine State.
In the process, he discovered 530 writers, poets and dramatists who were inspired to put pen to paper about Queensland, from the time it separated from New South Wales in 1859 until the present.
[Stephen Sossaman, from the journal Cerise Press, Summer 2010]:
While he concentrates on the laudable, Burt is not oblivious to common problems of contemporary poetry. Without naming names, he singles out “technical failure, amusia, useless dissonance, clashing figures of speech, semantic redundancy, and other problems of the sort that get hashed out in creative writing classrooms.” He salts his positive reviews with an occasional sotto voce warning, although these are usually phrased as weaknesses in the reader rather than in the poems, or as weaknesses that are really strengths of a sort. What might appear to be problems in the poetry sometimes turn out to be problems in the reader. Towards the end of a perceptive, positive and obviously well informed essay on the poems of Rae Armantrout, for example, Burt suggests that her poetry “is not for everyone: it’s usually dissonant; almost never mellifluous, unambiguous, or strongly narrative…” He notes that parts can seem opaque, that “it can be hard to know” why some poems are arranged as they are. Mary Leader’s poems “can sound amateurish in both the good and bad senses of that word.”
[Kathleen Noonan, The Courier-Mail, August 27th 2010]:
Peter, a doctor, reads Rumi after a shift at a Brisbane emergency to calm his adrenalin-fizzing veins. David the policeman reads Auden while drinking coffee in an all-night service station after a Friday night shift on the Gold Coast, to restore his belief that all of humanity is not made up of grubs.
[from the blog 'ursprache', August 27th 2010]:
A critic who had to buy the books he reviewed. No publisher would send him review copies.
[from the blog 'Verbumlogos', August 26th 2010]:
In 2000, Frank Kermode, the great literary critic and scholar who died last week at the age of 90, gave a lecture called “The Cambridge Connection” about the history of the Cambridge University English department. It sounds like a parochial enough topic until you realize that the major figures in that department were I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis—probably the most important English critics of the 20thcentury. Kermode was too modest to include himself in the list. This was a man, after all, who titled his memoir Not Entitled—but he was of the same stature and belonged to the same tradition.
[Steve Meacham, Sydney Morning Herald, August 27th 2010]:
Patrick White, Australia’s most celebrated literary figure, was at best ”a glass half-empty” kind of correspondent when it came to writing to friends.