SOUTHERLY
1 / 2008
Sister Arts
This issue focuses on the interconnections between literature, visual art and music in terms of collaboration, shared intensities, radical and defining differences. The essays consider a range of writers: Shirley Hazzard, Rosemary Dobson, Eleanor Dark and Dorothy Hewett and identify the large range of ways their writing takes on forms beyond or outside the accepted limits of literature. The issue also includes essays by practitioners reflecting on cross-genre connections in their own work, and others still on the role of book illustrations in the economy of literary readership and circulation. One of these essays analyses the nature of “gift” promised by the gift-book genre; the other, on the declining readership of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series across the twentieth century, provides the cover of the issue. Much of the fiction and poetry included in the issue takes up the theme of artistic cross-over: from the literary articulation of musical experience to the dialogic connections and tensions between visual art and poetic form. The issue also contains non-themed work including exciting new fiction and poetry from established and emerging writers, and a reviews section.
Poetry
Jessica Wilkinson: Shoot the birds • Andrew Taylor: Dust
• Bai Juyi (772–846) Grass • Jia Dao (779–843): Visiting the
Hermit • Stuart Cooke: Berlin World • Angela Rockel: How
I tell the Huon valley • To find a working definition of blessing
• David Gilbey: Death and the Motorway • Kevin Gillam: east
of then • Juned Subhan: Autumn • Carol Jenkins: Let the
loneliness roll in • Jan Owen: Milady Propinquity • Robert
Drummond: Approximately
Fiction
Jennifer Livett: The Commandant’s Letter • Kristel Thornell:
Miramare Park • Amanda Curtin: Live Forever • Stephen Orr:
Dr Singh’s Despair • Perle Besserman: Marriage and Other Travesties
of Love
Essays
Brigitta Olubas: Visual Art and Bourgeois Forms in Shirley Hazzard’s
Fiction • Hazel Smith: Morphing writing practices and feminist
experimentalism • Robyn Emerson: Requiem for A Little Bush Maid
• Helen O’Reilly: Linda's Linoleum: Visual Imaging in Eleanor Dark’s Prelude
to Christopher • Kate Livett: The Gift of Wisdom: Animals and Aphorism
in Contemporary Gift Books • Jasna Novakovic: The dialectic of myth
and politics in The Knight of the Long Knives by Dorothy Hewett
• Elizabeth Allen: The Ghost of Icarus • Raffaele Marcellino: Music
and words – siren and muse
Reviews
Kristen Lang of Nicolette Stasko, Glass Cathedrals: New & Selected
Poems and Dennis Haskell, all the time in the world • Ann Penhallurick
of Vanessa Berry, Strawberry Hills Forever • Anne Brewster of Anita
Heiss, I’m not racist, but... • Laura Joseph of Libby Robin, How
a Continent Created a Nation • David Brooks of Vrasidas Karalis, Recollections
of Mr Manoly Lascaris and Didier Coste, Days in Sydney