READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

 Jan Neruda died in Prague in 1891. He was a Czech national poet who had a street named for him in Mala Strana. The Chilean poet who took Neruda’s name for a pseudonym did so to hide from his father the fact that he wrote poetry. Hay algo más tonto en la vida que llamarse Pablo Neruda? Is there anything sillier in life than to be called Pablo Neruda? [XXXII] The pen name became his public name. Even before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, the Chilean had immortalised the unSpanish name of Neruda in a way undreamt of by his great Czech inspiration. Quién da los nombres y los números al inocente innumerable? Who assigns names and numbers to the innumerable innocent? [LXIV] Nearing his own death soon after that Prize, Pablo Neruda wrote a poem filled with questions. We can hear him gazing at the world. One of his recurring concerns is names. For poets, as for most of us, names are essential meaning, but as he meets mortalit...

So now we know, the poet had prostate cancer when he died. La muerte será de no ser o de sustancias peligrosas? Will death consist of non-being or of dangerous substances? [XXXV] They chose to dig up his remains in April of this year. Qué cosa irrita a los volcanes que escupen fuego, frío y furia? What is it that upsets the volcanoes that spit fire, cold and rage? [VIII] So many with a claim on Pablo Neruda still, so many wanting the truth. Pero sabes de dónde viene la muerte, de arriba o de abajo? But do you know from where death comes, from above or from below? [XXXVII] Now we know for sure that while writing all of these Spanish words he was suffering from cancer, these words that are the lines of his final long poem. Por qué anduvimos tanto tiempo creciendo para separarnos? Why did we spend so much time growing up only to separate? [XLIV] Everyone has their own Pablo Neruda, politicians and historia...

 Since ‘My Brother’s Book’ came out posthumously this year, I have been reading it nearly every night. The book only takes five minutes to read. Over five, ten, fifteen minutes I find something new each time in ‘My Brother’s Book’. Because, reading is only one of the things we do with any book by Maurice Sendak. Really the main thing we do is look. We look at each page in turn, each change of line or colour or sequencing or display, in a way that cannot be done were ‘My Brother’s Book’ an e-book. Because reading a book by Maurice Sendak is a book experience. No one reads his books for the information. We don’t read his books in order to get to the end in order to read something else next. We read his books for every detail of word and picture, ready to refer back or forward to other pages. We don’t want to miss anything. We go down or, as happens in somewhat equal measure, up wherever the author goes. It is still not completely clear what this story is all about. It doe...

Philip Harvey  The last word in Finnegans Wake is ‘the’, the English definite article. That book is Joyce’s desperate attempt to escape the confines of one language, English, to create some new pan-language best able to express his vision of human existence in time. The results remain contentious and open to dispute and interpretation. There is no end to Joyce’s cyclic explanation of the world and we who live in it. That’s as will be. Yet even though James Joyce invented a kind of Esperanto of imagination to dramatise his perceptions (itself a unique and incredible literary achievement), one of the ironies of Finnegans Wake is that it depends upon English language, grammar, and syntax in order to be intelligible. If Czech was his first language, Finnegans Wake would be similarly dependent on Czech grammar. Ironically, the book ends with the most common word in usage, and I don’t mean ‘okay’, I mean ‘the’. Indeed, Joyce himself explained to an interviewer that ‘the’ ...

The Young Poet Only Writes to the Academic Professor Thanks for the Original Message. Hell, it's 6:06 PM already and I haven't started cooking dinner. I guess Jasmine Anderson’s email doesn’t work and the sky is very grey over Greensborough, just like yesterday. We'd all really like a poem from her. She’s one of the main people on our list. But isn't she always? Damn it! The garden looks good with a wet path. 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme' is like something from another time or Time, as they say in those comics I threw in the recycler. Let's talk about the transfer of herbs but as the Pope has said many times it's an apology makes a world of difference and makes the world different… They've been saying that for some Time, Popes. And then there's the job. Not that they’ve actually given it to you yet, but you’re thinking you won’t go for it when they advertise it. A little oregano does wonders in a bolognese sauce. Simon...

Paul Kane Drowned Lands University of South Carolina Press 1 57003 341 2 Reviewed by Philip Harvey in The Australian Book Review, late 2005 This is a poet who believes in a book that ‘lies open, taking the measure/of the world, of what in dreams is sought or/found in the fissure that separates and/joins two translucent worlds of fire and ice.’ (‘Frost, at Midnight’) Paul Kane’s technique for filling such a book is not by universalizing or massive cataloguing, but through crystalizations of favoured themes into poems that can read deceptively like plain English.   In this book ‘sky and land were sold for a song, which became an anthem/and then a dirge,’ school was where ‘daydreams stopped and humiliating knowledge began,’ and you, the individual,’have come this far/and still you think/your life will endure.’ Kane has a skill at revealing how experiences transpose prior awareness into other meanings, deeper, darker. His first premise is that the world is whole. A...

Michael Thwaites UNFINISHED JOURNEY : COLLECTED POEMS 1932-2004 Ginninderra 1 74027 249 8 Reviewed by Philip Harvey in the Australian Book Review, early 2005 Gentlemen also write poems. Michael Thwaites is resolutely old school: set subjects, square metrics, good manners. He is a quiet achiever. Even his voice is quiet, though not so quiet that you can’t hear it. Solid statements, with a minimum of flourish or divertimenti, are his rule. The book is divided into five chronological sections, so you can follow the story of a life lived. ‘Milton Blind’, an earnest construction, wins the Newdigate Prize for 1938. There is his wartime classic, ‘The Jervis Bay’, the narration of a 1940 sea battle in the North Atlantic that borrows from British imperial action verse while interleaving Murrayesque graphics:            From the smoke floats are flowing Streams of velvet solid smoke drifting over the ocean swell, But the en...