Booknotes
Lifecycles: Stories and Poems
Richard Yaxley
Seaview Press, Henley Beach SA, 2005
Reviewer: Liz Huf
Born in Tasmania, resident in Hervey Bay, Richard Yaxley is well known for his plays, school musicals, short story and poetry anthologies, and has also published more than a dozen texts for secondary schools. University of Queensland Press published his first novel The Rose Leopard in 2003. Lifecycles is a potent collection of both stories and poems based on youth, adulthood and growing old. Written with his characteristic power and imagination, the characters throughout Yaxley’s work resonate strongly with Australian readers, as the blurb on Lifecycles’ back cover informs us. The sting, evident in many of the author’s short stories, certainly grips the reader in his poem Port Arthur 28/04/96. Here it is:
It’s strange how, within the breadth
of a whole and cluttered life,
a single moment can define your place
within the madcap scheme of things.
‘Zoe’ I say expansively to her
‘pop in and get us a coffee, darling.
I’ve drunk too much chardonnay at lunch;
caffeine and sleep will do me fine.’
She’s sometimes dutiful, my golden princess,
though she sashays into the café with
a retort on those lips that I like to kiss
and a swing of the hips that reminds me.
Meanwhile, there are bright birds a-singing
and buses cart-wheeling; the soft lapping
of pristine waters belies this history of death.
Here, though, is a record of slaughtered innocents.
Lord help me I doze, sinking lazily
amidst a clatter of radio, nature and chit-chat,
that distant thumping has to be a cannon:
another bloody re-enactment perhaps.
Funny dreams though: I thought I saw
some wacko surfie undoing a Nike bag,
then spraying execution as randomly
as the light wet foam from Clifton’s waves.
When I awake Zoe must have returned to that
tiny room where we fought and loved as one.
Spectators have gathered and a policeman wants me:
someone says he has blood on his tunic.
No coffee and the day is abnormally hot,
as bright and obscenely blue as my best silk tie.
I’ll wear it to the funeral of course.
alive and guilty, it’s the least I can do.
Organic Sister
Post Pressed, Flaxton, Queensland
by Lesley Singh
Reviewer: Liz Huf
Organic Sister is ‘an angled look at a woman’s life-journey through pleasure, pain and everything in between – wry, comedic, quirky, joyful, deft’, as reviewer Bronwen Levy notes on the back cover. Fascinating reading, with Lesley’s experiences as a teacher, a mother, a follower of Zen, touching a nerve with this excerpt from ‘Say no More’:
In your fiftieth year
on the mountain of pilgrimage
let the Virgin climb up
let the Crone climb down.
Bless the Woman with the mountain.
behind a door i hang
in case of emergency –
raincoat/mother.
