"The Taste of River Water" by Cate Kennedy

In my poetry class, we often come back to the question of what we think a poem should or could do. There are lots of answers, but one of my favourites is that a poem can show you something that you thought you knew about in a different and/or surprising way. To me, this is what Cate's poems do. While some might say they are too "prosey" or dwell too much on the ordinary, this is what gives her images such power. She sets the scene and then stuns the reader with imagery that you can see and feel and, at times, smell and touch.

Many of her poems, in fact, feel like narratives. When did we last read good narrative poetry? Some of Les Murray's do this, but many other Australian poets focus more on lyrical imagery and small moments in a landscape. Behind Cate's poems sit whole histories and what we see are not just glimpses but the bones of the stories within. She allows the reader to fill in the gaps, which is also what I think good poems do.

Not all of the poems are like narratives. Any collection benefits from variety, but I think what also underpins this one is a real sense of place. Some of you would be familiar with her poem, "8x10 colour enlargements $16.50" which tells of a farmer's wife, a talented amateur photographer, who enters a competition. The reader is invited into the poem: "Let me lay it out for you". We are in the local town hall with the poet, observing, commenting on the winning photo: "a massive sunset shot, the colours juiced with Photoshop" and the farmer's wife who said so little about the injustice that the poet felt compelled to show us what happened.

The collection is book-ended by two poems about writing poetry, an interesting touch given that I've heard Cate talk about her short stories and how often she tries to begin and end a story with images that mirror or connect in some way. As I said, I think this is where the strength of the poems lies, in the way an image will reach out from the page and hit you, make you pay closer attention to what is being created for you. For example, in "Windburn" after a day at the beach:

this rim of salt on my forearm
like unnoticed, evaporated tears,
as if I've spent today silent, unconsolable,
weeping into the crook of my elbow

My favourite poem in the collection is "Temporality". We don't need to know exactly what building this is, just that it's one with a secret history that the average museum visitor might well miss unless they looked more closely and used their imagination. This history is of ordinary working men, and the details tell us much more than you expect:

This four-inch nail banged in beside them to hold invoices
that they always meant to replace with a decent hook or clip;
see how it's holding fast
long after they have gone,
see how they were wrong
about what was temporary.

I could go on about this book of poetry all day, but I won't. However, I will recommend it very highly as one you should add to your bookshelf.
By the way, The Taste of River Water recently won the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry.

To Review or Not to Review?

When I first started this blog, it was destined to be my own personal reading record of books I loved and hated, with comments. I read tons of books and when someone would ask me for a recommendation, my mind would go blank! So a blog seemed like a good idea. This was about six years ago, so it really only was just for me. Then I started to add stuff about writing, and teaching writing, and it grew.

Now things are changing again, and I'm having to think very carefully about content and audience, which of course is what most writers do about everything they write! I've been contacted now by several publishers asking me if I'd be interested in reviewing their books. Well, yes. And no. Because previously I had focused on books I either loved (like "Matterhorn") or hated (like "Twilight") - from a writer's point of view.

So today my first two "review" copies arrived. And I have had to think seriously about what I am going to do (I think we can assume I have now declared my "position" as required by US law). If I hate a book, usually my response is to say why, or ignore it. What if I hate everything publishers send me? (It's possible.) I guess I am going to continue being myself - looking at each book from the POV of a writer. What works, what doesn't, and why. That's my "thing".

But there will no doubt be books that I can't say anything about, good or bad. They're just ... books. People complain about bad reviews in newspapers and magazines, while others say any publicity is good publicity. I thought - what if every newspaper or mag had the policy - if we don't like it, we won't review it. But then if your book never got reviewed, you would have to assume they hated it. What a downer! (You can tell I'm still thinking like an author, can't you?)

Regardless of all of that, this is not now a review blog. I include my reviews now and then when I think they will be useful (or I love a book and have to tell you about it). We'll see how we go ...

What Do Reviews Do?

When you have a new book out, you hold your breath. Will the reviews be good? Or awful? Will your book be reviewed at all? Do reviews make any difference? There have been studies done on the reasons why people buy a book. Reviews come way down on the list. Top reason is word of mouth. I think it's why so many authors have leapt into blogging and Facebooking and Twittering - trying to create their own word of mouth. The jury is still out on how well it works, but in the meantime, we try it anyway because the reviews were minimal, or they were in magazines with a low circulation, or we received one bad one and we're trying to bury it somehow.

With the growth of the internet, reviewing has become an unpaid hobby for many people. There are readers who have posted hundreds of reviews on Amazon, readers who have reviewing blogs, readers who submit reviews on spec to respected magazines, like Good Reading. How much notice do we take of any of them? And what is their agenda? With a review in a magazine or journal or newspaper, the assumption is that this person is reviewing because they are respected for their informed, professional opinion. None of us want to imagine this kind of reviewer throwing our book across the room, yet there are reviews published where this seems to be what happened.

On the other hand, there are one or two famous reviewers who are famous simply for their ability to be totally vitriolic about nearly every book. That just makes me wonder what they eat for breakfast. But at least their agenda is fairly obvious - they're being paid to do a job. Other kinds of reviews can be problematic. One example is the person who writes a critical review, simply in order to promote themselves as an "expert" who could have written that book better. If only they'd been asked. Another example is the person who is trying to make a name for themselves as an amateur reviewer and tries to be deliberately contentious.

Yet another problem arises when the reviewer seems to mis-read the book, and bases their comments on misconceptions. Often I wonder if the reviewer ran out of time and just skimmed the book. Sometimes reviewers have a personal agenda unknown to anyone else but the writer of the book and his/her close friends. I've had the "pleasure" of my book being reviewed by someone who disliked me personally, and wrote a dismissive review. It's so hard not to sling some harsh words back when that happens, but it's usually not worth the trouble. You just make things worse. Far better is to take the best phrase or sentence out of its context and use it in your publicity!

Mostly, I think reviewers try to do a good job. I know of some who refuse to review a book they don't like, which is a positive thing to do. If you receive a bad review, you just have to suck it up and move on. There are many strategies for overcoming any bad publicity that might come out of it - the afore-mentioned social networking, getting your friends on-board to help promote the good reviews, or simply getting out and about and talking to people about your book (school visits, if you write children's books, are a wonderful antidote - thirty excited Grade One kids who want you to sign their book, for example).

The one thing you can't do is brood about it. I know people who have stacks of good reviews, but can quote word-for-word their one bad review. What is the point? Do you really want to constantly remind yourself of it? Why? Instead, think of how many reviews you've read over the years, and ask yourself how many have influenced you NOT to buy a book. I can't think of one, and I do read lots.

Yes, a good review might tempt me to try a new author, but if I analysed my reasons for purchase, they usually come down to "read a book by that person before and liked it" or "my friend recommended it". Or, best of all, I was browsing in a bookshop and found it and read the first few pages and that made me buy it. So instead of reading your reviews, go back and read the first chapter of your current work-in-progress and ask yourself if it would influence your intended readership to buy it.

I do post short commentaries on this blog occasionally, but I don't consider them to be reviews. I always look at books here from the point of view of a writer - what worked, what didn't work (for me) and why. And I also talk about what I might have learned as a writer from this book, e.g. setting from James Lee Burke. If I influence anyone to buy a book, I'm usually not aware of it. It's interesting when readers agree or disagree with me. But it's still just one person's opinion.