Seduced by the Sky

Helen Avery
Nardoo Publishing, Longreach 2005

Reviewer: Liz Huf

Helen Avery manages her family property near Longreach in Western Queensland where she has lived for 25 years. Her life has been intimately involved with the Australian outback landscape. Harsh dry times and good seasons parallel her existence, in which she has faced both lasting happiness and devastating tragedy. Helen took part in Idiom 23’s NKI island writers’ workshop this year, and several of the poems she shared with us came from this small volume Seduced by Sky. These finely crafted poems express a variety of bush characters from grazier and farmer’s wife to Kalkadoon bushman, piano man and painter, to the despair of drought and finally to the epiphany of rain.

In the wet morning dawn waking
the creeks are running –
a chorus of paddocks shouting with frogs
a brown and boiling surge of froth and water
guttering into cracks
around tussocks
dodging lignum
running dry gullies –
the channels are filling
hustling their way to the river…

The old river
deep and sleeping
between banks of clay
and the tangled roots of coolibah trees
wakes and trembles

The river’s coming down
a vast movement of silt sodden waters
drawn south
across a broad and waiting land…

(excerpt from River Poems p 60) In this collection,
Helen Avery certainly ‘opens the lid’ on the rich potential of her writing.
If you love contemporary poetry, you should read Seduced by Sky.

The Best Australian Stories 2005

Edited by Frank Moorhouse
Black Inc., Melbourne 200

Reviewer: Liz Huf

Frank Moorhouse has assembled a rich and provocative collection with well known authors Janette Turner Hospital, Peter Goldsworthy, Gillian Mears, Chris Mansell and Joanna Kujawa, It also includes talented newcomers Patrick Cullen, Melissa Goode and Alison Ravenscroft. One of the emerging authors Danielle Wood, who teaches at the University of Tasmania, won the 2002 The Australian/Vogel Literary Prize and 2004 Dobbie Award for her first novel The Alphabet of Light and Dark, while Charlotte Wood’s novel The Submerged Cathedral was short listed for the 20205 Miles Franklin Award.

Another exciting author writing in this collection is Tara June Winch of Wiradjuri, (of Afghan and English heritage) who won the national David Unaipon Award for her novella Swallow the Air in 2004. Perusing its contents, I was proud to see our own champion writer Jena Woodhouse represented in this volume. Jena with a degree in Russian literary studies is currently working on her PhD in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. This book is a very stimulating read with its wide variety of language, style and theme.