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A number of the stories turn at the aperçu, the character’s life coming full circle. Not all stories are ominous and not all mysteries are solved, but collectively the stories in Casual Mysteries and Aperçus shine a light on prejudice, anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny, the unreliability of memoir and perhaps how even dire situations tend to work itself out over time. As you might expect from a poet, Casual Mysteries and Aperçus contains poetry, insight, intrigue, and a whole lot of fun.
Writing Resonance was, in the end, a joy, not because it was easy but because it was shared. The process deepened our respect for each other and, perhaps more importantly, our understanding of what collaboration can be. We are already at work, at least in imagination, on the next novel—more ambitious and more complex, set across different times and worlds. We now know the process will not be seamless. There will be disagreements, uncertainties, and moments of doubt.
And to be is to be filled with wonder, an emotion that is threaded throughout this book. “The Arrival” is about the wonder of a mother giving birth to her child. While it is spoken in third person, the poem is so visceral it seems as if told from the newborn’s point of view. “Clutching at the foreign, warm five/ fingered hands, sucking, plucking,/ poking at skin rampaged by the/ stinging air surrounding her.” The wonder of nature pervades “My Garden.” In the garden death, in the form of a dead dragonfly, coexists with life, a snake and a toad.
This is not a writer who takes the easy way out. As she learns to mother her son, she leaves delectable signposts for the reader, as the page turns from journalism to inventive forms of speculative and factual nonfiction. Not only is this her story, but it is also the story of what this all means to the writer—and ultimately the reader— who is offered the gift of witnessing how Banham’s approach to mothering and its history in her family unfolds.
Metaphor, irony, and paradox abide in all five sections of this book. The ball in the opening poem of the first section, “And just like that,” becomes more than a ball “red hot as it flew overhead, each time / gathering speed covered / a greater distance,” literally in the park, figurative in the poet’s emotional landscape.
Although we see the inner journey of Artie and a couple of his closest friends, the story steps out of introspection enough to show us a good view of the 1980s-era occupied nation. Train stations, nightclubs, folk music, hotels and tourist sites, and the countryside and ordinary people’s homes paint a portrait of a nation with a vibrant culture, even under occupation.
The book is very much centred on water: its criticality to human and other forms of life, and the ways in which we are intimately connected by water to all living things. Though The Green Room is relatively short it covers a lot of ground, with thirty short poems that are powerfully condensed. Keneally utilises the gaps or silences between words and stanzas, often separating lines with double, triple or quadruple spaces. The poems flow like water, leaving plenty of room to pause and reflect between words.
Every committed reader eventually faces the same question at the airport gate.
Do you carry the 600-page hardcover you’re halfway through, or the slim e-reader that holds it and four hundred other titles? For years the debate was framed as a loyalty test, paper purists on one side and early adopters on the other.
Plenty of readers have quietly settled it. They read both, and they’ve developed surprisingly consistent rules about which book goes where.
The plots of these three stories unfold slowly. All three have many characters, and each character is necessary, each plays a part in moving their story to its conclusion. In the first two stories the main characters are well intentioned but become victims of their own righteousness. Ironically the protagonist of “A Fully Clothed Breakfast” wins the war, not on the battlefield but within himself.
With a one-word title, a poem becomes a political statement, a thermometer of the zeitgeist. But Horvath refuses to settle down. Her North Star drives a quest for understanding. She is wondering about meaning and purpose, particularly when answers aren’t obvious. How do we know when it’s good? How do we know it’s enough? Where does the poem end?